Plans You Can Check: Verifier-Grounded Learning of an Open-Weight Planner for Executable Video-Editing

arXiv:2608.25622 · cs.CV, cs.CL · Submitted 2026-08-26 · Read on arXiv

cs.CV, cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-08-26

Updated: 2026-08-26

Comments: Accepted to the Main Conference of EMNLP '26

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Practical video editing is not only pixel generation: an editor must turn a brief, a clip pool, music metadata, and hard constraints into an executable timeline.

Terminology

Abstract

Practical video editing is not only pixel generation: an editor must turn a brief, a clip pool, music metadata, and hard constraints into an executable timeline. We study this decision layer as executable video-editing planning and introduce RefineCut, which, unlike workflow systems that wrap a prompted frontier model, trains a compact open-weight planner for it. The planner edits a typed timeline through structured patches covering clip selection, trimming, ordering, transitions, and duration and music alignment; a deterministic verifier applies each patch and checks it against an explicit constraint ledger. Because editing has no single ground-truth repair, we do not imitate teachers directly: RefineCut replays every multi-teacher branch through the verifier and keeps verifier-best repairs as supervision. A second stage, RefineCut-Evo, lets the student score its own repairs with the verifier and a task rubric and trains on high-margin preference pairs, so the final 8 B planner runs in a closed verifier loop with no teacher calls at inference. On RefineCut-Bench (3, 578 tasks, 7, 971 captioned clips, 499 music tracks, explicit ledgers), verifier-replayed distillation lifts the planner from 0.620 to 0.858 on the protocol-specific Video-Editing Score and RefineCut-Evo reaches 0.924; the gain transfers to Llama-3.1-8B and GLM-4-9B, and in the same closed loop the 8 B planner matches or exceeds its frontier teachers. Code and RefineCut-Bench are publicly released; see the Data Availability statement.

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