Paper Detail

Beyond Trial-and-Error: Agentic Optimization for Image-to-Video Adherence

Aman Tyagi, Hemanth Boinpally, Jonathan Chen, Douglas Gebert, Steven Hickson

arxiv Score 17.2

Published 2026-08-12 · First seen 2026-08-13

General AI

Abstract

Modern black-box Image-to-Video (I2V) models offer powerful capabilities in automated content creation, yet their lack of fine-grained control and reliability presents significant challenges in professional workflows. Their inherent stochasticity causes minor variations in textual prompts or hyperparameters to yield drastically different outputs often necessitating inefficient, brute-force trial-and-error processes. To address these limitations, we introduce the ``Agentic Self-Improvement" framework, which reframes video synthesis into a closed-loop, goal-directed optimization. Our framework systematically navigates the generation parameter space using a novel two-stage approach. In the first stage, an iterative prompt optimization loop uses a multimodal Large Language Model (mLLM) to refine the input prompt. This refinement implements two automated evaluations: Davidsonian Scene Graph (DSG) queries ensure semantic adherence, and Common Mistake Questions (CMQ) for artifact detection. At the second stage, we use Bayesian optimization to efficiently co-optimize stochastic seeds and CFG scales. This search is guided by a suite of quality metrics, including the novel Video-Text Adherence (VTA) score derived from the DSG and CMQ evaluations. Our framework significantly outperforms unguided search methods: in human preference studies, videos generated via our agentic approach were strongly preferred over baseline outputs, achieving win rates up to 69\%. This work provides a practical and extensible methodology for enhancing the predictability and control of state-of-the-art video generation models, moving the field beyond speculative curiosities toward reliable, production-ready tools.

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BibTeX

@article{tyagi2026beyond,
  title = {Beyond Trial-and-Error: Agentic Optimization for Image-to-Video Adherence},
  author = {Aman Tyagi and Hemanth Boinpally and Jonathan Chen and Douglas Gebert and Steven Hickson},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Modern black-box Image-to-Video (I2V) models offer powerful capabilities in automated content creation, yet their lack of fine-grained control and reliability presents significant challenges in professional workflows. Their inherent stochasticity causes minor variations in textual prompts or hyperparameters to yield drastically different outputs often necessitating inefficient, brute-force trial-and-error processes. To address these limitations, we introduce the ``Agentic Self-Improvement" frame},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12290},
  keywords = {cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.MM},
  eprint = {2608.12290},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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