Results show that although current models achieve strong semantic adherence and visual quality, they often fail to faithfully capture fine-grained cultural details, particularly for underrepresented regions, rituals, and multimodal cultural cues.
Abstract
Text-to-video (T2V) generation models have advanced rapidly, yet their ability to represent diverse cultural contexts remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on perceptual quality, physical plausibility, and text-video alignment, but do not directly assess whether generated videos capture culturally specific objects, actions, rituals, visible text, or audio cues. We introduce CultureVidBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating cultural understanding in T2V generation. CultureVidBench contains 1,000 curated prompts covering 12 countries, 6 continents, 8 cultural regions, and 14 cultural aspects organized into three categories: material culture, social practice&performance, and ritual&ceremony. Designed specifically for video generation, CultureVidBench emphasizes dynamic and multimodal cultural representation, including social interactions, ritual procedure, and culturally appropriate visible text and audio. We evaluate seven representative T2V models through human user studies and MLLM-based automatic assessment across cultural faithfulness, multimodal cultural rendering, semantic adherence, and perceptual quality. Results show that although current models achieve strong semantic adherence and visual quality, they often fail to faithfully capture fine-grained cultural details, particularly for underrepresented regions, rituals, and multimodal cultural cues.
This study introduces MVSCBench, the benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal AI models’ ability to interpret symbolic and cultural meanings in music videos. Using K-pop music video clips, we organize music video understanding into three stages: surface perception, symbolic interpretation, and cultural grounding. Based on this framework, we construct a dataset of 293 video clips and 3,516 annotations, covering space, artist, character symbolism, object symbolism, literary symbolism, social-historical symbolism, and fandom cultural symbols. The results show that current multimodal AI models perform well on surface perception tasks, but still face clear limitations in symbolic interpretation and cultural grounding. In particular, the models often struggle to correctly identify relevant visual cues and frequently produce hallucinated interpretations in categories involving deeper meanings. MVSCBench provides a new benchmark for evaluating symbolic and cultural understanding in music videos and offers a useful framework for future research.
Natural-language-driven"vibe coding"enables the one-shot generation of visually rich and interactive web applications, yet reliable assessment of their quality has not kept pace. Existing evaluations often score isolated artifacts or final task outcomes, offering limited evidence about which failures occur and why. We introduce VideoVIBE, a video-grounded benchmark that transforms human-operated webpage recordings into fine-grained diagnostic tasks. It contains approximately 1.7K diagnostic Video QA instances derived from 6,338 verified failures across generated webpages, spanning semantic-logical, visual-motion, structural-temporal, and functional failures. Diagnoses are grounded primarily in recorded presentation and behavior, with webpage source code used as complementary context. We further propose V2Lens, a training-free, evidence-grounded multi-agent system that challenges and selectively refines initial video-based diagnoses through targeted visual and source-code verification. Across thirteen closed-source and open-weight Video MLLMs, Gemini-2.5-Flash is the strongest standalone model with a score of 64.54, while V2Lens reaches 71.72, an improvement of 7.18 points. Together, our results show that video-grounded evaluation can move beyond isolated artifacts and aggregate outcomes toward a behaviorally faithful and diagnostically informative account of generated application quality.
Jiajun Xu, Yanghao Zhou, Jing Liao et al.· 0 citations
Video-to-music generation has drawn growing interest for its role in conveying the emotion of visual media, including film. Progress in the field, however, is hampered by a reproducibility gap: models are often trained on crawled corpora referenced through YouTube URLs that may be deleted, with the underlying data often difficult and time-consuming to retrieve. To address this, we introduce the Open Screen Soundtrack Library version 2 (OSSL-v2), a self-hosted corpus of 34,343 video clips totaling 246.4 hours, sourced from public-domain films. Unlike crawled corpora, OSSL-v2 is reproducible (i.e., not subject to link rot) and copyright-conscious, yet still large enough to train functional video-to-music models. We then use this film-domain corpus to study dialogue as a conditioning signal for video-to-music generation, motivated by the close temporal coupling between film music and on-screen speech. Specifically, we augment existing models'video cross-attention with a time axis and modulate it frame-by-frame with the dialogue track. Evaluated on both public-domain and commercial films, our approach shows improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/McAuley-Lab/OSSL-v2.
Haven Kim, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley et al.· 1 citation
NARU, a benchmark designed to evaluate Narrative evolution and Reasoning on cultural Understanding in Japanese long-form video, is introduced, a hierarchical memory-based annotation pipeline that transforms raw video into structured event, narrative, and cultural annotations, then generates questions via task-oriented synthesis and iterative shortcut removal.
Yuheng Huang, Jianlang Chen, Jiayang Song et al.· 0 citations
An Implicit Cultural Alignment Reward Model built upon a lightweight 4.2-billion-parameter Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) integrated with a Skip-connection Cross-Attention mechanism, enabling late-stage semantic features to directly attend to early-stage visual representations and better preserve culturally salient details.
