# Putting Captions to the Test: Evaluating Video Caption Quality through Multiple-Choice Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09973 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09973/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15754/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [VATEX: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Video-and-Language Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03493/) (2019)
- [Perception Test: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13786/) (2023)
- [MMBench-Video: A Long-Form Multi-Shot Benchmark for Holistic Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14515/) (2024)
- [Tarsier: Recipes for Training and Evaluating Large Video Description Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00634/) (2024)
- [AuroraCap: Efficient, Performant Video Detailed Captioning and a New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03051/) (2024)
- [Tarsier2: Advancing Large Vision-Language Models from Detailed Video Description to Comprehensive Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07888/) (2025)
- [Cross-modal Scene Graph Matching for Relationship-aware Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05134/) (2019)
- [TIGEr: Text-to-Image Grounding for Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02050/) (2019)
- [How Good is my Video LMM? Complex Video Reasoning and Robustness Evaluation Suite for Video-LMMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03690/) (2024)
- [InfoMetIC: An Informative Metric for Reference-free Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06002/) (2023)
- [QACE: Asking Questions to Evaluate an Image Caption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12560/) (2021)
- [CaptionQA: Is Your Caption as Useful as the Image Itself?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21025/) (2025)
- [VCapsBench: A Large-scale Fine-grained Benchmark for Video Caption Quality Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23484/) (2025)
- [BERTHA: Video Captioning Evaluation Via Transfer-Learned Human Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10243/) (2022)
- [QEVA: A Reference-Free Evaluation Metric for Narrative Video Summarization with Multimodal Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24052/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating video captioning remains a critical challenge for Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs). Existing metrics primarily rely on matching generated text against ground-truth references. This paradigm suffers from the ``one-to-many'' nature of video description, where high-quality captions are often penalized for lexical mismatches or valid shifts in visual focus. Furthermore, such assessments are typically one-dimensional, failing to provide a fine-grained analysis of caption quality. To address this, we redefine caption quality through the lens of information fidelity: A caption must maximize the coverage of salient visual information while ensuring strict factuality. We introduce CapQuiz, a novel reference-free benchmark that assesses captions based on their utility in answering human-verified, fine-grained, multiple-choice questions derived from the video. CapQuiz features a hierarchical taxonomy of 10 question types (spanning Descriptive and Inferential categories) across 24 diverse video domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CapQuiz correlates significantly better with human judgments than existing metrics and offers interpretable insights into model performance.