Evaluating Multimodal Narrative Understanding of Popular Hollywood Films
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arXiv:2608.30068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Films communicate through deliberate creative choices, including lighting, color, composition, editing, dialogue, music, and sound. Humans naturally in...
arXiv:2609.36218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly evaluated in specialized domains such as law, medicine, software engineering, and cybersecurity, yet film rema...
arXiv:2606. 09846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual art remains largely inaccessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences due to brief or absent alt-text, which rarely conveys the sensory, spatial, or emotional qualities of an artwork.
Narrating the visual component of movies is known as audio description. It is a narrative technique designed to enable blind and visually impaired individuals to follow the story.
The paper introduces Short‑Films 20K (SF20K), a large publicly available movie dataset comprising 20,143 amateur films totaling 3,582 hours, with an average length of 12 minutes per film. Accompanying the dataset is SF20K‑Test, a manual open‑ended question‑answering benchmark featuring 95 movies and 979 question‑answer pairs. Analysis of the benchmark shows limited data leakage, highlights the necessity of long‑term reasoning, and demonstrates that instruction tuning on the large‑scale dataset significantly boosts vision‑language model performance.
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.