VidCapBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Video Captioning for Controllable Text-to-Video Generation

Xinlong Chen, Yuanxing Zhang, Chongling Rao, Yushuo Guan, Jiaheng Liu, Fuzheng Zhang, Chengru Song, Qiang Liu, Di Zhang, Tieniu Tan


Abstract
The training of controllable text-to-video (T2V) models relies heavily on the alignment between videos and captions, yet little existing research connects video caption evaluation with T2V generation assessment. This paper introduces VidCapBench, a video caption evaluation scheme specifically designed for T2V generation, agnostic to any particular caption format. VidCapBench employs a data annotation pipeline, combining expert model labeling and human refinement, to associate each collected video with key information spanning video aesthetics, content, motion, and physical laws. VidCapBench then partitions these key information attributes into automatically assessable and manually assessable subsets, catering to both the rapid evaluation needs of agile development and the accuracy requirements of thorough validation. By evaluating numerous state-of-the-art captioning models, we demonstrate the superior stability and comprehensiveness of VidCapBench compared to existing video captioning evaluation approaches. Verification with off-the-shelf T2V models reveals a significant positive correlation between scores on VidCapBench and the T2V quality evaluation metrics, indicating that VidCapBench can provide valuable guidance for training T2V models. The project is available at https://github.com/VidCapBench/VidCapBench.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.449
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
8543–8563
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.449/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinlong Chen, Yuanxing Zhang, Chongling Rao, Yushuo Guan, Jiaheng Liu, Fuzheng Zhang, Chengru Song, Qiang Liu, Di Zhang, and Tieniu Tan. 2025. VidCapBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Video Captioning for Controllable Text-to-Video Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 8543–8563, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VidCapBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Video Captioning for Controllable Text-to-Video Generation (Chen et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.449.pdf