arXiv Computer Vision By Shuo Xing, Pooja Verlani, Balu Adsumilli, Zhengzhong Tu

CinematicVQA: Benchmarking Film-Grammar Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models

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CinematicVQA is a new benchmark for evaluating large vision‑language models on film‑grammar reasoning. It introduces the Cinematic Scene Graph, a structured representation linking filming techniques to perceptual effects and narrative functions, and tests models on tasks beyond low‑level technique recognition. The study finds a semantic gap where models excel at describing visuals but struggle to identify underlying techniques, and shows that fine‑tuning improves performance on narrative function and multi‑hop reasoning.

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