Paper Detail

CineCap: Structured Reasoning with Spatio-Temporal Anchors for Cinematographic Video Captioning

Xinyu Mao, Yuhui Zeng, Xiaokun Liu, Wenyu Qin, Meng Wang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Xiaohan Xing, Max Meng

arxiv Score 22.2

Published 2026-06-23 · First seen 2026-06-24

General AI

Abstract

Cinematographic captioning aims to describe how a video is filmed using professional film-language concepts such as camera movement, shot size, depth of field, composition, and shooting angle. This capability is important for fine-grained video understanding and controllable movie-quality video generation, yet remains underexplored in existing multimodal large language models. Unlike question-answering-based evaluation of cinematic understanding, cinematographic captioning requires a unified open-form description over multiple cinematographic dimensions. This task is challenging for two main reasons: the model must infer professional cinematographic concepts from subtle visual evidence, and it must generate captions that are both comprehensive and accurate. Accordingly, we propose CineCap, a framework that combines structured reasoning with spatio-temporal anchors and reinforcement learning with comprehensiveness, accuracy, and gated coverage rewards. The former grounds professional cinematographic descriptions in explicit visual evidence and organizes them into compact atomic reasoning for supervised fine-tuning, while the latter improves the balance between descriptive completeness and factual correctness. In addition, we construct CineCap Bench, a benchmark of 472 manually annotated video-caption pairs for systematic evaluation. Extensive experiments show that CineCap consistently outperforms strong proprietary and open-source baselines, establishing a new state of the art for cinematographic captioning. The code, model checkpoint, and benchmark are publicly available in https://github.com/Hectormxy/CineCap.git.

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BibTeX

@article{mao2026cinecap,
  title = {CineCap: Structured Reasoning with Spatio-Temporal Anchors for Cinematographic Video Captioning},
  author = {Xinyu Mao and Yuhui Zeng and Xiaokun Liu and Wenyu Qin and Meng Wang and Xin Tao and Pengfei Wan and Xiaohan Xing and Max Meng},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Cinematographic captioning aims to describe how a video is filmed using professional film-language concepts such as camera movement, shot size, depth of field, composition, and shooting angle. This capability is important for fine-grained video understanding and controllable movie-quality video generation, yet remains underexplored in existing multimodal large language models. Unlike question-answering-based evaluation of cinematic understanding, cinematographic captioning requires a unified ope},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24636},
  keywords = {cs.AI},
  eprint = {2606.24636},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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