Evaluating Visual Narrative Coherence in Story Visualization via Diversified Storylines

Minha Jhang, Kyeongman Park, Hyukhun Koh, Kyomin Jung


Abstract
Story visualization requires generating a coherent sequence of images that collectively form a narrative, yet existing evaluation metrics and datasets often overlook visual continuity and narrative diversity. In this paper, we introduce the Visual Context-Aware Metric for Story Visualization, which uses large vision-language models to jointly assess caption fidelity and inter-image consistency, achieving Spearman’s correlation comparable to human agreement on two benchmarks. Also, to address the shortcomings of narrowly defined datasets with low diversity, we propose a diffusion-augmented evaluation pipeline that blends diverse and controlled narrative elements at adjustable ratios, producing challenging evaluation sets. By combining VCMS with this pipeline, we provide a scalable, human-aligned framework for evaluating story visualization models.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1578
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
34192–34207
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1578/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minha Jhang, Kyeongman Park, Hyukhun Koh, and Kyomin Jung. 2026. Evaluating Visual Narrative Coherence in Story Visualization via Diversified Storylines. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 34192–34207, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Visual Narrative Coherence in Story Visualization via Diversified Storylines (Jhang et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1578.pdf
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