Papers for
media content platforms
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Ai agents struggle with real video editing in finished deliverables
Timeline-Bench: Evaluating Agents on Realistic Video-Editing Tasks, from Raw Footage to Final Cut
Abstract: AI agents increasingly carry out long-horizon professional work, but their evaluations rarely require a finished creative deliverable. To this end, we introduce Timeline-Bench, a benchmark of 56 real video-editing tasks, each asking an agent to turn raw production material into a finished video. Tasks range from selecting dialog takes and shaping interview footage into a story to cutting commercials from product shots, voiceovers and graphics. Every task provides a brief, source assets, a container and a set of tests. A task is resolved when the output passes every test. The tests check the delivery format, the content and the brief's explicit requirements, and include a quality test calibrated on 2,582 blind judgments by 43 video editors. We evaluate 16 agents that pair frontier models with coding-agent harnesses such as Codex, Claude Code and OpenCode. The best, GPT-6 Astra in Codex with curated editorial guidance, resolves only 15 of the 56 tasks (26.8%), and the average agent resolves 14.0%. Human editors prefer the reference edit in 83.5% of judgments. Most unresolved runs (562 of 771) fail only the quality test: agents perceive footage through stills and transcripts and check their renders for defects, not craft. We release the tasks, verifier and per-run results at https://timelinebench.tensortest.com.
Large AI models struggle to understand cinematic storytelling techniques
CinematicVQA: Benchmarking Film-Grammar Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models
Abstract: Cinematography, the craft of visual storytelling through framing, lighting, and camera operation, fundamentally shapes how audiences perceive and emotionally engage with video content. While Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable progress in video question answering, existing benchmarks primarily focus on identifying low-level techniques rather than understanding their storytelling impact. To address this, we introduce CinematicVQA, the first-of-its-kind benchmark for cinematic video understanding that goes beyond technique recognition to evaluate film-grammar reasoning, utilizing our introduced Cinematic Scene Graph (CSG), a structured representation that links filming techniques to their perceptual effects and narrative functions. Through comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LVLMs, we reveal a striking semantic gap: models consistently perform higher on describing visual presentations than on identifying the underlying techniques. Surprisingly, Chain-of-Thought prompting fails to provide consistent gains and degrades performance for most models, suggesting that current LVLMs lack sufficient cinematic domain knowledge to benefit from step-by-step reasoning. Fine-tuning on \textsc{CinematicVQA-train} yields consistent improvements, particularly for narrative function and multi-hop reasoning. Overall, \textsc{CinematicVQA} serves both as a rigorous benchmark for cinematic evaluation in LVLMs and as a practical dataset for training more film-aware video models.
VideoX-Qwen enables instruction-based video editing with large data and models
VideoX-Qwen: Data-Centric Instruction-Based Video Editing
Abstract: Progress in general-purpose video editing depends on constructing large-scale paired supervision and effectively adapting video-generation backbones to instruction-driven editing. Unlike video generation, video editing must execute a requested transformation while preserving unrelated subjects, scene structure, motion, and temporal continuity. We present VideoX-Qwen, an integrated data-construction and model-training framework for general instruction-based video editing. Our scalable production pipeline organizes specialized generation and understanding models into complementary routes for addition, removal, replacement, and attribute editing, followed by quality screening and instruction enrichment. It produces more than 1.2 million directional video-editing records, including over 400,000 records in each major task group, with an automatic acceptance rate of 89%. The resulting corpus provides broad and structured coverage of common editing operations through a unified source-instruction-target interface. We further develop a unified Qwen-Wan editor that combines multimodal semantic conditioning with dense source-video latent guidance. A progressive image-video training strategy aligns the multimodal instruction interface, adapts the video generator to source-conditioned editing, and refines output quality with selected high-resolution data. In a 100-example comparison with UniVideo and Kling O1, VideoX-Qwen achieves the best mean result on nine of eleven reported metrics, including instruction following, editing quality, content preservation, structural and perceptual similarity, and video-distribution quality. Together, the large-scale data-production system and unified training framework provide a practical foundation for more capable instruction-driven video editing.