Not (yet) the whole story: Evaluating Visual Storytelling Requires More than Measuring Coherence, Grounding, and Repetition
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Visual storytelling consists in generating a natural language story given a temporally ordered sequence of images. This task is not only challenging for models, but also very difficult to evaluate with automatic metrics since there is no consensus about what makes a story 'good'. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that measures story quality in terms of human likeness regarding three key aspects highlighted in previous work: visual grounding, coherence, and repetitiveness. We then use this method to evaluate the stories generated by several models, showing that the foundation model LLaVA obtains the best result, but only slightly so compared to TAPM, a 50-times smaller visual storytelling model. Upgrading the visual and language components of TAPM results in a model that yields competitive performance with a relatively low number of parameters. Finally, we carry out a human evaluation study, whose results suggest that a 'good' story may require more than a human-like level of visual grounding, coherence, and repetition.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 29 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2024.
Builds on
29 of 44 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
5 papers.
- 2025VIST-GPT: Ushering in the Era of Visual Storytelling with LLMs?cited by 11
- 2025Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Temporal and Contextual Narratives in Image Sequences?cited by 4
- 2024Generating Visual Stories with Grounded and Coreferent Characterscited by 1
- 2025Natural Language Generation from Visual Events: State-of-the-Art and Key Open Questionscited by 1
- 2026Where is the multimodal goal post? On the Ability of Foundation Models to Recognize Contextually Important Momentscited by 0
- 2026Where is the multimodal goal post? On the Ability of Foundation Models to Recognize Contextually Important Moments22 Jan 2026
- 2025VIST-GPT: Ushering in the Era of Visual Storytelling with LLMs?27 Apr 2025
- 2025Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Temporal and Contextual Narratives in Image Sequences?19 Feb 2025
- 2025Natural Language Generation from Visual Events: State-of-the-Art and Key Open Questions18 Feb 2025
- 2024Generating Visual Stories with Grounded and Coreferent Characters20 Sep 2024