Towards Unified Evaluation of Prompt Enhancers for Video Generation

arXiv:2610.11736 · cs.CV · Submitted 2026-10-08 · Read on arXiv

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Introduction to the show: ident: AI Radio. Generated commentary on the latest Artificial Intelligence papers.

Tom: Today's paper: "Towards Unified Evaluation of Prompt Enhancers for Video Generation".

Jane: The gist The introduction of PEBench, which comprises 1,100 expert-verified cases and 1,005 visual assets spanning 35 fine-grained tasks with diverse temporal, cinematic, audiovisual, and multi-reference requirements.

Tom: First, who's behind it and why it matters.

Title and authors: Tom: So we're looking at this paper 'Towards Unified Evaluation of Prompt Enhancers for Video Generation' and what it does—it really tackles the problem of how we judge these prompt enhancers right now.

Jane: Exactly. It introduces something called PEBench, which is presented as the first unified benchmark for directly evaluating prompt enhancers across text-to-video, image-to-video, and reference-to-video tasks.

Lu: What's striking about it is that instead of relying on rendered videos to judge quality—which takes a lot of time and computing power—they created this framework that lets you evaluate the enhanced prompts directly without running any generators.

Meng: That decoupling of prompt quality from generator behavior sounds really practical, especially when we’re trying to iterate fast in development.

Lalam: It means we can assess the enhancement quality based on a set of rules and criteria rather than just watching a video and hoping for the best results from the AI.

Tom: Right, so they've built this PEBench with one thousand one hundred expert-verified cases and over a thousand visual assets across thirty five fine-grained tasks that cover everything from temporal needs to cinematic requirements.

Jane: The construction of this dataset is quite detailed; they design nine video genres and then break them down into thirty five specific task types, which helps make sure the evaluation is really comprehensive.

Lu: They use Gemini three point one Pro to synthesize user prompts with varying instruction specificity, moving between single-shot and multi-shot formats depending on what the task requires <ref:2610.11736#pg1>.

Meng: And for gathering those visual references, they have a few routes, including public data and even model-generated ones using tools like Wan-Image or Seedream.

Lalam: The verification process involves ten domain experts refining the cases after an automated check to ensure everything is clear and difficult enough to be useful for testing.

Tom: So, what's the evaluation framework they propose? It’s not just one way to score things; it combines modality-aware fact extraction with rubric-based assessment across twenty four criteria.

Jane: They organize these twenty four criteria into three main dimensions: Semantic Fidelity, Internal Consistency, and Directorial Creation.

Lu: Semantic Fidelity checks if the enhanced prompt actually preserves what the original user asked for, Internal Consistency looks at whether the narrative or spatiotemporal elements make sense together, and Directorial Creation assesses how good the creative guidance is for realizing that video.

Title and authors: Meng: I see that breaking those twenty four criteria down into those three buckets—fidelity, consistency, and creation—makes it much easier to understand what’s being measured.

Lalam: It’s a structured way to look at prompt quality so it's not just one big blob of feedback.

Tom: What have they found so far in their initial systematic evaluation? They suggest there's an emerging shift away from just fine-grained descriptive expansion toward planning cinematic intent.

Jane: Specifically, caption-reconstruction methods seem to cover more cinematic ground than forward-refinement methods, which tend to focus more on keeping the meaning or the internal consistency of the scene intact.

Lu: And they noted that increasing complexity, whether it's temporal details for text-to-video or reference assets for reference-to-video, generally causes performance degradation in prompt enhancement.

Meng: That's a key finding—that pushing the boundaries of complexity doesn't necessarily make the prompts better; it actually makes them harder to enhance effectively.

Lalam: They also found that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods have complementary strengths, meaning you should probably use both depending on what you need from the final prompt.

Tom: The results are pretty strong when you look at the correlations; they achieved Spearman correlations above zero point eight with expert rankings for both the enhanced prompts and videos produced by models like Wan3 point 0 and MiniMax-H3 <ref:2610.11736#pg1>.

Jane: That correlation suggests that evaluating the prompt directly is a reliable way to predict how well it will perform in actual video generation downstream.

Lu: They also pointed out some specific weaknesses, like original prompts often had high semantic fidelity but low directorial creation, meaning they preserved the facts but weren't very creative in guiding the visual style.

Meng: And when they looked at complexity specifically, they found that longer outputs didn't consistently lead to better results; in fact, the longest output quartile trails the shortest by a bit in terms of directorial creation across all tasks.

Lalam: They also flagged some specific challenges for temporal structure and reference complexity, showing that cases with three or more event stages or three or more images trail single-image cases quite a bit in fidelity and creation scores.

Tom: So what does this mean practically for someone who just uses these tools? It suggests that focusing on planning the cinematic execution—things like storyboard completeness and camera design specificity—is more important than just making the prompt longer.

Title and authors: Jane: It means we should be designing prompts to provide a production plan, not just a description of what to show.

Lu: They suggest that for reference-to-video tasks, there's a real bottleneck in getting the prompt to properly integrate different references when they are all quite varied.

Meng: So for those R2V tasks, the system needs to be really good at cross-asset verification during its reasoning phase to make sure it actually integrates those heterogeneous references.

Lalam: It sounds like we need a way to ensure that when a prompt mentions multiple images, it actually connects them coherently in the final instruction.

Tom: In conclusion, the paper 'Towards Unified Evaluation of Prompt Enhancers for Video Generation' shows that this benchmark is a strong foundation because it links direct prompt evaluation to actual downstream results across different generator types.

Jane: It confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods work well together depending on what kind of enhancement you are aiming for.

Lu: The biggest implication is moving away from just descriptive expansion and toward building cinematic plans that preserve intent while focusing on structure and planning, especially when dealing with complex inputs.

Meng: From an engineering standpoint, this gives us a clearer target for training: we need to train the AI not just to make longer text, but to create structured specifications for temporal planning and audiovisual design.

Lalam: It sounds like the next step is making sure that whatever system we build can handle those complex reference integrations without losing coherence or fidelity.

Tom: So, if you're working on enhancing video prompts right now, this benchmark shows you what to expect when you evaluate your work against real-world generation capabilities.

Jane: It gives us a solid way to measure quality that doesn't rely on running slow video models every time we want feedback.

Lu: The whole point of PEBench is to create a scalable system for comparing and advancing these prompt enhancers systematically across all three video modalities.

Meng: So, the future work seems focused on refining this unified framework further, making it even more robust as the underlying generative models get more complex.

Lalam: It’s about building a comprehensive way to assess these tools so that we can see exactly where the gaps are in the enhancement process itself.

The paper's summary: Tom: So, to wrap up that first bit—PEBench is this new benchmark that lets us test video prompts directly without having to run a whole generator every time we want feedback.

Jane: Right, it’s this unified system designed to evaluate prompt enhancers for text-to-video, image-to-video, and reference-to-video tasks all at once.

Lu: The core idea is that you can assess the quality of the enhanced prompt itself using a set of rules rather than just watching the resulting video.

Meng: So instead of waiting to see if a video looks good, we're looking at how well the AI understood our instructions before it even started making anything.

Tom: Exactly. They built this with one thousand cases and assets across thirty five fine-grained tasks, covering everything from timing to visual style requirements.

Jane: The framework they use combines fact extraction with rubric-based assessment across twenty four criteria split into semantic fidelity, internal consistency, and directorial creation.

Lu: They're essentially checking if the prompt keeps what you asked for—fidelity—if the story makes sense visually and temporally—consistency—and if it gives good creative guidance for the final video.

Meng: That’s interesting because most of us have to rely on downstream video quality, but this lets us judge the prompt quality independently.

Tom: And what they found is a shift in how we think about prompting, moving away from just adding descriptive words toward planning the actual cinematic execution of the video.

Jane: They saw that caption-reconstruction methods are better at covering cinematic ground, while forward-refinement methods focus more on keeping the scene's meaning and coherence intact.

Lu: The numbers showed that things like increasing temporal complexity or having too many reference images actually hurt the prompt enhancement scores in some cases.

Meng: So, it’s not just about making prompts longer; adding too much detail can actually make the enhancement worse for certain tasks.

Tom: They also found a real gap where prompts could have high fidelity but low directorial creation, meaning they described what to show well but didn't give good creative direction on how to film it.

Jane: This suggests that for a prompt to be truly useful, it needs both accurate information and strong creative planning woven together.

Lu: And the correlation they found between these prompt scores and the actual videos made by models like Wan3 point zero was above zero point eight across the board.

Meng: That means when we judge the prompt well on PEBench, it actually predicts how good that video will be when a generator makes it.

Tom: So, the big picture here is that this benchmark gives us a scalable way to compare and advance these tools by focusing on structure and planning rather than just descriptive expansion.

Jane: It provides a solid way to measure prompt quality that doesn't rely on running slow video models every time we want feedback.

Lu: Now, the next thing we need to look at is how this evaluation framework actually works in practice across those different task types.

The paper's improvements: Tom: So we're looking at what they suggest to improve this whole benchmarking system for video prompts right now.

Jane: The authors point out that we need to shift our focus from just making the text longer toward planning actual cinematic intent in the enhanced prompt.

Lu: They argue that if a prompt is only descriptive, it’s not very useful; we need to give it structured specifications for things like storyboard timing and camera design specificity.

Meng: That makes sense from an engineering side. We can't just tell the AI to write more words; we have to make sure those extra words are actually planning something tangible.

Tom: And they suggest that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods really have complementary strengths, so maybe we need a hybrid approach depending on what kind of input we're using.

Jane: They also highlight the difficulty with reference grounding in reference-to-video tasks, suggesting the prompt itself needs to be explicitly designed to address cross-asset consistency during its reasoning phase.

Lu: That means for those complex R2V tasks, the system has to do a better job of connecting all those different images and references coherently within the prompt’s structure.

Meng: If we're building models, this tells us that our training objective shouldn't just be about generating coherent text; it needs to be about generating production-ready plans.

Tom: And they found that when dealing with complexity, like needing more than one event stage or multiple images, the performance drops in a predictable way.

Jane: So, the implication is that as we push for longer or more complex video prompts, we need better mechanisms to handle that added complexity without losing fidelity.

Lu: They’re essentially saying that building this unified evaluation system helps us identify exactly where those planning gaps are most severe across different modalities.

Meng: It gives us a clearer target for training: we need to train the AI not just to make longer text, but to create structured specifications for temporal planning and audiovisual design.

Tom: So, it’s about making the evaluation process smarter so that it forces prompt enhancers to think like directors rather than just word counters.

Jane: And this whole process helps align the prompt quality with what actually happens when a video generator takes that instruction and tries to make it real.

Conclusion: Tom: So we're wrapping up on this session about 'Towards Unified Evaluation of Prompt Enhancers for Video Generation'.

Jane: Exactly, it boils down to PEBench being a scalable way to test prompt enhancers across all video modalities.

Lu: The main implication is that we can finally judge prompt quality directly against actual downstream results, which is a big step.

Meng: It means we can stop just guessing how good a prompt will be and get hard data on its effectiveness right away.

Lalam: For culture, this gives us a better way to guide the development of generative AI tools so they actually create what we intend them to make.

Tom: They confirmed that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods have complementary strengths depending on the task, which is pretty helpful for developers.

Jane: It’s good because it stops us from thinking there’s just one perfect way to write a prompt enhancement instruction.

Lu: The work confirms that focusing on structural planning rather than just word length is the way forward for getting better results in complex scenarios.

Meng: So, if you're building a system, the focus needs to be on creating specifications for temporal planning and audiovisual design rather than just making longer text.

Tom: That’s the practical shift we need to make in how we think about prompt engineering for video generation.

Jane: It moves us from being descriptive writers to being directors of AI output.

Lu: It also shows that by systematically breaking down the criteria into fidelity, consistency, and creation, we can see exactly where those planning gaps are most severe across different tasks.

Meng: That systematic view helps us know where to focus our engineering efforts for better results in the long run.

Lalam: And for the wider culture, seeing this kind of rigorous evaluation framework being built is encouraging because it shows a path toward more reliable and intentional AI creation.

Yawen Shao, Yubo Zhu, Ziyun Dai, Zixun Fang, Kai Zhu, Zeyinzi Jiang, Yufeng Ai, Siyang Sun, Haolan Xue, Yu Shang, Yuxiang Bao

University of Science and Technology of China Wan Team, Alibaba Group Nanjing University Fudan University Tsinghua University Northeastern University

cs.CV

Submitted: 2026-10-08

Updated: 2026-10-08

Comments: Project page: https://github.com/yawen-shao/PEBench

Code: https://github.com/yawen-shao/PEBench

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Importance score: 92/100

The gist: The gist The introduction of PEBench, which comprises 1,100 expert-verified cases and 1,005 visual assets spanning 35 fine-grained tasks with diverse temporal, cinematic, audiovisual, and

Key concepts

PEBench
A unified benchmark comprising 1,100 expert-verified cases and 35 fine-grained tasks covering diverse video requirements. It allows for direct evaluation of prompts to assess prompt enhancement quality independently of the video generator's performance.
T2V-PE, I2V-PE, R2V-PE
These represent the three distinct task settings in the benchmark: Text-to-Video Prompt Enhancement (T2V), Image-to-Video Prompt Enhancement (I2V), and Reference-to-Video Prompt Enhancement (R2V). They test how well a prompt is enhanced for generating video from text, an image, or a reference.
Semantic Fidelity, Internal Consistency, Directorial Creation
These are the three main dimensions used to evaluate enhanced prompts. Semantic Fidelity checks if the source requirements are preserved. Internal Consistency examines narrative and spatiotemporal coherence. Directorial Creation assesses how well the prompt guides the intended video's creative realization.

Terminology

Summary

The gist The introduction of PEBench, which comprises 1,100 expert-verified cases and 1,005 visual assets spanning 35 fine-grained tasks with diverse temporal, cinematic, audiovisual, and multi-reference requirements.

PEBench Overview

PEBench is introduced as the first unified benchmark for direct evaluation of video prompt enhancers across T2V-PE, I2V-PE, and R2V-PE It comprises 1,100 expert-verified cases and 1,005 visual assets spanning 35 fine-grained task types The framework combines modality-aware fact extraction with rubric-based assessment across 24 criteria. This allows for direct evaluation of enhanced prompts to assess PE quality independently of generator behavior.

Task and Data Construction

The benchmark spans three distinct task settings: Text-to-Video Prompt Enhancement (T2V-PE), Image-to-Video Prompt Enhancement (I2V-PE), and Reference-to-Video Prompt Enhancement (R2V-PE). The dataset construction pipeline involves four stages. Stage 1 involves taxonomy design and composition, where domain experts define nine video genres and refine them into 35 fine-grained task types. Stage 2 utilizes Gemini 3.1 Pro to synthesize a user prompt from specifications, varying instruction specificity from concise to detailed and temporal structure between single-shot and multi-shot formats. Stage 3 covers reference asset acquisition through two routes: public data selection and model-generated references using Wan-Image [29], Seedream [30], and GPT Image 2 [31]. Stage 4 is automated verification followed by expert curation, where ten domain experts refine the verified cases for clarity and difficulty.

Evaluation Framework

The evaluation framework in PEBench assesses enhanced prompts along three dimensions: Semantic Fidelity (SF), Internal Consistency (IC), and Directorial Creation (DC). These dimensions are organized into three complementary dimensions: Semantic Fidelity verifies the preservation of source requirements, Internal Consistency examines narrative, spatiotemporal, and audiovisual coherence, and Directorial Creation assesses the quality of creative guidance for realizing the intended video. The 24 fine-grained criteria are organized into Semantic Fidelity, Internal Consistency, and Directorial Creation.

Key Findings

The systematic evaluation reveals an emerging shift from fine-grained descriptive expansion toward intent-preserving cinematic planning. Caption-reconstruction methods achieve broader cinematic coverage, whereas forward-refinement methods favor semantic preservation or internal coherence. Increasing temporal and reference complexity generally degrades PE performance. PEBench evaluation scores achieve Spearman correlations above 0.8 with expert rankings of enhanced prompts and downstream videos produced by Wan3.0 and MiniMax-H3, indicating that prompt-level evaluation reliably reflects downstream utility across generators.

Analysis of Complexity and Length

Original prompts reveal a substantial adequacy gap, achieving high Semantic Fidelity but low Directorial Creation. A length-stratified analysis shows no consistent benefit for output length, as the longest output quartile trails the shortest by 5.19 to 10.09 points in DC across all tasks. Temporal complexity on T2V-PE and reference complexity on R2V-PE remain persistent challenges. Specifically, cases with three or more event stages trail those with one stage by 3.67, 3.92, and 1.98 points in SF, IC, and DC for temporal structure. Similarly, cases with three or more images trail single-image cases by 7.42 points in SF and 2.71 points in DC for reference complexity.

Qualitative Failures and Utility

Qualitative failure analysis shows representative errors across all three dimensions. These include visual-style deviation, incorrect subject–action binding, dialogue and voice mismatch, incomplete storyboard coverage and temporal planning, and multi-reference grounding failure. Human validation confirms that PEBench scores align closely with expert judgments of enhanced prompts and downstream videos from Wan3.0 and MiniMax-H3. The Spearman correlations of 0.809 to 1.000 indicate that direct prompt evaluation reliably reflects downstream utility across generators.

Conclusion

PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers by unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis. The study confirms the practical relevance of direct PE evaluation through strong alignment with expert judgments at both the prompt and downstream-video levels. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. Strong alignment with expert judgments at both the prompt and downstream-video levels confirms the practical relevance of direct PE evaluation. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers. The study confirms that caption-reconstruction and forward-refinement methods exhibit complementary strengths. By unifying task coverage, evidence-grounded assessment, and criterion-level analysis, PEBench provides a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and advancing video prompt enhancers.

Improvements for AI systems

  1. Bold header: Directorial Planning Shift

The improved PE system should shift from finegrained descriptive expansion toward intent-preserving cinematic planning, as observed in findings, by explicitly optimizing for criteria like "Storyboard & Timing Completeness and Camera Design Specificity" to ensure the enhanced prompt provides actionable production plans.

  1. Bold header: Complementary Method Strengths

PE systems should be designed to leverage the specific strengths identified: caption-reconstruction methods achieve broader cinematic coverage, whereas forward-refinement methods favor semantic preservation or internal coherence, suggesting a hybrid architecture that combines both approaches for optimal results across different conditioning modalities (T2V-PE, I2V-PE, R2V-PE).

  1. Bold header: Addressing Complexity Bottlenecks

The system must incorporate mechanisms to mitigate performance degradation under complexity by focusing on cinematic planning that preserves user intent rather than mere length; specifically, it should prioritize structured, task-relevant specifications for temporal planning, cinematography, narrative development, and audiovisual design rather than merely lengthening prompts.

  1. Bold header: Enhancing Reference Grounding

For R2V-PE tasks, the system should implement robust cross-asset verification by ensuring that the prompt explicitly addresses reference coverage and cross-asset consistency during its internal reasoning phase to overcome the observed reference-grounding bottleneck, where prompts can remain coherent while failing to adequately integrate heterogeneous references.

  1. Bold header: Alignment with Expert Utility

The improved system's training objective should be directly aligned with human judgment, aiming for the demonstrated high Spearman correlations, as PEBench evaluation scores achieve Spearman correlations above 0.8 with expert rankings of enhanced prompts and downstream videos produced by Wan3.0 and MiniMax-H3.

Sources

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