MovieTeller: Tool-augmented Movie Synopsis with ID Consistent Progressive Abstraction

TL;DR

MovieTeller introduces a tool-augmented, multi-stage framework for generating factually accurate, character-consistent movie synopses by leveraging external face recognition tools and progressive abstraction, without requiring model fine-tuning.

Contribution

It presents a training-free, plug-and-play approach that enhances long-form video summarization by integrating external tools and multi-stage processing for improved coherence and factual grounding.

Findings

Significant improvements in factual accuracy over baselines

Enhanced character consistency in generated summaries

Better narrative coherence in long-form video summaries

Abstract

With the explosive growth of digital entertainment, automated video summarization has become indispensable for applications such as content indexing, personalized recommendation, and efficient media archiving. Automatic synopsis generation for long-form videos, such as movies and TV series, presents a significant challenge for existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs). While proficient at single-image captioning, these general-purpose models often exhibit critical failures in long-duration contexts, primarily a lack of ID-consistent character identification and a fractured narrative coherence. To overcome these limitations, we propose MovieTeller, a novel framework for generating movie synopses via tool-augmented progressive abstraction. Our core contribution is a training-free, tool-augmented, fact-grounded generation process. Instead of requiring costly model fine-tuning, our framework directly leverages off-the-shelf models in a plug-and-play manner. We first invoke a specialized face recognition model as an external "tool" to establish Factual Groundings--precise character identities and their corresponding bounding boxes. These groundings are then injected into the prompt to steer the VLM's reasoning, ensuring the generated scene descriptions are anchored to verifiable facts. Furthermore, our progressive abstraction pipeline decomposes the summarization of a full-length movie into a multi-stage process, effectively mitigating the context length limitations of current VLMs. Experiments demonstrate that our approach yields significant improvements in factual accuracy, character consistency, and overall narrative coherence compared to end-to-end baselines.