QEVA: A Reference-Free Evaluation Metric for Narrative Video Summarization with Multimodal Question Answering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Video-to-text summarization remains underexplored in terms of comprehensive evaluation methods.Traditional n-gram overlapbased metrics and recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches depend heavily on human-written reference summaries, limiting their practicality and sensitivity to nuanced semantic aspects.In this paper, we propose QEVA, a reference-free metric evaluating candidate summaries directly against source videos through multimodal question answering.QEVA assesses summaries along three clear dimensions: Coverage, Factuality, and Chronology.We also introduce MLVU(VS)-Eval, a new annotated benchmark derived from the MLVU dataset, comprising 800 summaries generated from 200 videos using state-of-theart video-language multimodal models.This dataset establishes a transparent and consistent framework for evaluation.Experimental results demonstrate that QEVA shows higher correlation with human judgments compared to existing approaches, as measured by Kendall's τ b , τ c , and Spearman's ρ.We hope that our benchmark and metric will facilitate meaningful progress in video-to-text summarization research and provide valuable insights for the development of future evaluation methods. 1
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".