# Understanding Virality: A Rubric based Vision-Language Model Framework for Short-Form Edutainment Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21402/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 7 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [VideoScore: Building Automatic Metrics to Simulate Fine-grained Human Feedback for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15252/) (2024)
- [VideoScore2: Think before You Score in Generative Video Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22799/) (2025)
- [Rendering-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Vector Graphics Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20793/) (2025)
- [GeoChain: Multimodal Chain-of-Thought for Geographic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00785/) (2025)
- [MaRVL-QA: A Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning over Visual Landscapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17180/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating short-form video content requires moving beyond surface-level quality metrics toward human-aligned, multimodal reasoning. While existing frameworks like VideoScore-2 assess visual and semantic fidelity, they do not capture how specific audiovisual attributes drive real audience engagement. In this work, we propose a data-driven evaluation framework that uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to extract unsupervised audiovisual features, clusters them into interpretable factors, and trains a regression-based evaluator to predict engagement on short-form edutainment videos. Our curated YouTube Shorts dataset enables systematic analysis of how VLM-derived features relate to human engagement behavior. Experiments show strong correlations between predicted and actual engagement, demonstrating that our lightweight, feature-based evaluator provides interpretable and scalable assessments compared to traditional metrics (e.g., SSIM, FID). By grounding evaluation in both multimodal feature importance and human-centered engagement signals, our approach advances toward robust and explainable video understanding.