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arXiv:2505.24862v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Story visualization aims to generate coherent image sequences that faithfully depict a narrative and align with character references. Despite progress in generative models, existing benchmarks are narrow in scope, often limited to short prompts, lacking character references, or single-image cases, and fail to capture real-world storytelling complexity. This hinders a nuanced understanding of model capabilities and limitations. We present \textbf{ViStoryBench}, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate story visualization models across diverse narrative structures, visual styles, and character settings. The benchmark features richly annotated multi-shot scripts derived from curated stories spanning literature, film, and folklore. Large language models assist in story summarization and script generation, with all outputs human-verified to ensure coherence and fidelity. Character references are carefully curated to maintain intra-story consistency across varying artistic styles. To enable thorough evaluation, ViStoryBench introduces a set of automated metrics that assess character consistency, style similarity, prompt alignment, aesthetic quality, and generation artifacts such as copy-paste behavior. These metrics are validated through human studies, and used to benchmark a broad range of open-source and commercial models. ViStoryBench offers a multi-dimensional evaluation suite that facilitates systematic analysis and fosters future progress in visual storytelling.