Short-form videos have become a primary medium for digital advertising, requiring scalable and efficient content creation. However, current workflows and AI tools remain disjoint and modality-specific, leading to high production costs and low overall efficiency. To address this issue, we propose AutoCut, an end-to-end advertisement video editing framework based on multimodal discretization and controllable editing. AutoCut employs dedicated encoders to extract video and audio features, then applies residual vector quantization to discretize them into unified tokens aligned with textual representations, constructing a shared video-audio-text token space. Built upon a foundation model, we further develop a multimodal large language model for video editing through combined multimodal alignment and supervised fine-tuning, supporting tasks covering video selection and ordering, script generation, and background music selection within a unified editing framework. Finally, a complete production pipeline converts the predicted token sequences into deployable long video outputs. Experiments on real-world advertisement datasets show that AutoCut reduces production cost and iteration time while substantially improving consistency and controllability, paving the way for scalable video creation.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the AutoCut framework. Low–fps frames are tokenized for efficient multimodal reasoning, while high–fps frames are kept for accurate visual matching and clip retrieval. Given optional inputs, AutoCut predicts video, text, and audio tokens, which are decoded or retrieved to compose the final advertisement video.
Figure 2: Overview of the proposed AutoCut framework. Multimodal tokenization converts scripts, frames, and audio into unified discrete tokens, which are organized into an alignment input sequence. Stage 1 performs multimodal alignment on large-scale data to align the added token embeddings with the LLM backbone. Stage 2 applies task-specific SFT for video selection, video sorting, script generation, and BGM selection.
Figure 3: Dataset statistics for the multimodal alignment (top) and SFT (bottom) stages. The alignment dataset is substantially larger but exhibits more diverse and irregular distributions, while the SFT dataset is smaller yet more balanced and of higher annotation quality.
Model
Video
Script
Audio
CSA
CRA
VSC
SQ
WCD ↓
MSS
Qwen3–8B [ 32 ] (Caption)
0.1374
0.01648
0.9308
79.9947
5.2648
–
Qwen3–8B (Caption + SFT)
0.5687
0.03022
1.1227
59.1592
6.8230
–
Qwen3–32B [ 32 ] (Caption)
0.1731
0.01373
0.9342
80.7747
7.1023
–
Qwen2.5-VL–7B Instruct [ 4 ]
0.2418
0.01648
0.9649
79.4867
6.4709
–
Qwen2.5-VL–32B Instruct [ 4 ]
0.6648
0.02472
0.9980
78.3180
12.5071
–
Table 1: Quantitative results across all tasks. The best results are boldfaced and the second best results are underlined.
Method
CSA
CRA
VSC
SQ
WCD ↓
sft only
0.4780
0.08242
1.0043
83.1898
4.4346
emb+full+sft
0.7170
0.05770
0.9669
78.9644
4.4984
emb+sft (ours)
0.6593
0.10714
1.0360
84.6255
3.0182
Table 2: Ablation on training settings.
Figure 4: User study results: win–loss ratios against GPT-4o across five evaluation dimensions.
RQ-VAE Configs
Video
Audio
Input feature size
128
2048
Quantization heads
8
8
Codebook size
256
256
Codebook dim
128
256
Shared codebook
False
False
Encoder MLP size
[512, 512]
[1024, 512]
Table 3: Hyperparameters for the video and audio RQ-VAE quantizers.
Config
Alignment Stage
SFT Stage
Base model
Qwen3-8B
Aligned model
Template
qwen3
qwen3
Cutoff length
8096
4000
Packing
Enabled
Disabled
Per-device batch size
2
1
Grad. accumulation
1
1
Table 4: Hyperparameters used during the multimodal alignment and SFT stages.
Figure 5: Qualitative case studies of our automatic ad video editing pipeline. For each case (top: wireless earbuds, bottom: children’s face cream), we show the provided product information, selected video clips, and the aligned script sentences. Each frame strip visualizes the model’s clip selection and ordering, together with the corresponding sentence and clip-level timestamps, illustrating how the system produces a coherent, time-aligned ad from raw footage and product metadata.
Figure 6: Additional human study comparing AutoCut with Gemini 3 on 50 advertisement videos. A large proportion of cases are judged as Tie across all five dimensions, indicating that AutoCut achieves performance highly comparable to this stronger and more recent baseline.
Figure 7: Overview of our dataset construction pipeline. Top : multimodal alignment data construction. Raw ad videos are paired with sentence-level scripts and product information, then segmented into short clips using punctuation-aligned timestamps, producing aligned video tokens and audio tokens. Bottom-left : data filtering. We keep videos whose clip number and duration fall within preset ranges and whose visual–script relevance score (estimated by Qwen2.5-VL-32B) exceeds an 80% threshold. Bottom-right : task-oriented SFT dataset construction. From the filtered aligned data we instantiate four supervision signals: video selection, video sorting, script generation, and BGM selection, each conditioned on product information and/or the full script.
Criterion
Positive indicators
Negative indicators
Visual Smoothness
• Transitions feel natural and continuous. • No obvious stutter, jitter, or dropped frames. • Motion and camera movement appear stable.
• Noticeable lag, stutter, or frame skipping. • Abrupt cuts that break visual flow. • Shaky or inconsistent motion that distracts the viewer.
Logical Consistency
• Shot order follows a clear story or explanation. • The same product and context are maintained throughout. • Scene changes support a coherent narrative or demo.
• Scenes feel random or out of order. • Products or contexts change without explanation. • Transitions break the story or confuse the viewer.
Script–Visual Alignment
• The script accurately describes what appears on screen. • Key selling points are shown at the right visual moments. • No hallucinated objects, brands, or functions.
• The script mentions things not visible in the video. • Important visual content is not reflected in the script. • Timing between narration and visuals is clearly off.
BGM–Visual Compatibility
• Music tempo matches motion and editing rhythm. • Overall mood fits the product and scenario. • Volume and energy support, rather than overshadow, the content.
• Music is too fast/slow compared with visual rhythm. • Style or emotion of the music feels inappropriate. • Sudden changes in volume or style that distract the viewer.
Overall Attractiveness
• The ad is engaging and easy to follow. • Product value and advantages are clearly conveyed. • You would be more willing to consider buying the product.
• The ad feels dull, confusing, or unconvincing. • Product value is unclear or poorly communicated. • You would not be motivated to learn more or purchase.
Table 5: Human evaluation criteria and decision guidelines used in the pairwise comparison study.
Editing the video content with audio alignment forms a digital human-made art in current social media. However, the time-consuming and repetitive nature of manual video editing has long been a challenge for filmmakers and professional content creators alike. In this paper, we introduce CutClaw, an autonomous multi-agent framework designed to edit hours-long raw footage into meaningful short videos that leverages the capabilities of multiple Multimodal Language Models~(MLLMs) as an agent system. It produces videos with synchronized music, followed by instructions, and a visually appealing appearance. In detail, our approach begins by employing a hierarchical multimodal decomposition that captures both fine-grained details and global structures across visual and audio footage. Then, to ensure narrative consistency, a Playwriter Agent orchestrates the whole storytelling flow and structures the long-term narrative, anchoring visual scenes to musical shifts. Finally, to construct a short edited video, Editor and Reviewer Agents collaboratively optimize the final cut via selecting fine-grained visual content based on rigorous aesthetic and semantic criteria. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate that CutClaw significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality, rhythm-aligned videos. The code is available at: https://github.com/GVCLab/CutClaw.
Shifang Zhao, Yihan Hu, Ying Shan +2
Beijing Jiaotong University · GVC Lab, Great Bay University · ARC Lab, Tencent
Autonomous video editing from open-world resources remains a challenging problem in multimedia content creation. Retrieval-based methods are constrained by fixed source material and lack creative flexibility, while generative models struggle with long-horizon coherence and often diverge from user intent. Both paradigms fail to replicate the structured, multi-stage reasoning that underlies professional post-production. To address these limitations, we present Auto-Director, a tool-augmented multi-agent framework that mirrors professional editorial workflows: a Planning Agent decomposes abstract topics into fact-grounded scripts via retrieval-augmented planning; a Material Agent indexes open-world footage through shot segmentation and visual tagging; an Editor Agent assembles semantically aligned clips with MLLM-driven spatial adaptation; and a Critic Agent governs an iterative Reflect-and-Revise loop that checks scene-level alignment and pacing. To rigorously evaluate this new paradigm, we introduce VEdit-Bench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated topics with human-annotated Golden Scripts and a five-dimensional metric suite covering Narrative Logic, Factual Accuracy, Semantic Alignment, Compositional Quality, and Stylistic Cohesion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Auto-Director significantly outperforms baseline methods in both automated metrics and human evaluation, effectively bridging the gap between amateurs and professional-grade video production.
Yuxia Chen, Wenbo Zhu, Yangguang Ji +3
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China · University of California, Berkeley · Nanyang Technological University +3
Video editing has become essential in digital media creation, yet existing automated systems are restricted to short segment processing and domain-specific tasks. They face two critical limitations: i) inability to handle diverse video comprehension and editing operations, and ii) lack of long-video understanding for coherent narrative creation. We propose VideoAgent, an all-in-one agentic framework addressing these challenges through two key innovations. First, we develop automated video shot creation with shot planning agents for coherent narratives and cross-modal retrieval for aligned visual content. Second, we design a multi-agent orchestration framework integrating over thirty specialized editing agents. Intent parsing filters relevant tools while textual-gradient graph optimization assembles complex editing pipelines. Extensive experiments on our newly-proposed VideoEdit benchmark and public datasets demonstrate VideoAgent's superiority over existing multimodal LLMs and agentic systems. VideoAgent achieves 87-95% orchestration success rates while reducing API costs by 60%. Human evaluation across six video categories shows VideoAgent produces professional-quality content approaching human-level performance, with ratings only 4% below human-created videos. We release our code at https://github.com/HKUDS/VideoAgent.
Hengji Zhou, Lingxuan Huang, Jian Wang +4
1Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · 2South China University of Technology · 3The University of Hong Kong +1