Organizations: Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, USA · The Harker School · Basis Independent Silicon Valley · Saratoga High
Generative AI has made content creation increasingly accessible, but many AI-generated videos lack narrative coherence and creative direction, issues that become more substantial at longer durations. Unlike coding, where AI generation benefits from reliable feedback and techniques such as recurrent self-improvement, video generation requires subjective feedback about plot, scenes, and narrative, which naturally motivates approaches that incorporate human creative direction. We introduce CHIEF, a human-AI co-creation video generation framework that places the creator at the center of human-in-the-loop iterative video refinement, and supports them by providing automatic subjective feedback. The creator incorporates their creative direction by driving each iteration, while their revisions are incorporated by a specialized refiner agent. The feedback loop is generated by persona-conditioned multimodal LLMs that watch generated videos and produce subjective critique from the audience perspectives, providing feedback that self-evaluation alone cannot capture. To test the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we work with high school and college students with no prior filmmaking experience to create videos, from short 1-minute videos to a complete short 10-minute film with a complicated plot.
Recent advances in video generative models have enabled high-fidelity, temporally coherent video generation. However, these models often struggle to satisfy prompts requiring specialized knowledge, specific identities, physical consistency, or ordered events. In this paper, we present VideoGen-Agent, a multimodal agent trained through multitask agentic reinforcement learning to use external tools for video generation. The agent coordinates augmentation, generation, and verification tools through multi-turn interactions, using the prompt and intermediate observations to guide its decisions. We train a shared policy on a category-balanced dataset spanning six tasks. Supervised fine-tuning on teacher-generated trajectories establishes tool-use behavior, which is then refined through reinforcement learning. A category-aware hybrid reward evaluates tool-call validity, task-appropriate tool use, and generated video quality. We further introduce VABench, a held-out benchmark of 600 prompts covering procedural knowledge, single- and multi-entity identity preservation, physical consistency, scene composition, and multi-shot temporal structure. On VABench, VideoGen-Agent improves over its base text-to-video generator by 19.1 points, from 56.5 to 75.6. Upgrading the generation tools further raises the score to 86.1 without additional agent training. Human raters prefer the upgraded configuration over the strongest standalone baseline in 84.3% of comparisons. These results support learning tool use across video-generation tasks and show that the trained agent can benefit from subsequent advances in generation tools.
Modern video generators excel at synthesizing individual clips, but complete video production requires coordinating a long sequence of interdependent creative steps, including scripting, storyboarding, generation, and editing. It further demands persistent asset management and dynamic task orchestration as intermediate outputs, dependencies, and execution states evolve over time. Existing automated systems typically rely on rigid pipelines that are difficult to adapt to diverse inputs and changing workflows, while general-purpose large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for long-horizon orchestration and multimodal asset routing. We introduce FRAMEWORKERS, a task-centric and workspace-grounded multi-agent framework for open-ended video production. A central Director formulates video creation as dynamic task management, continuously editing a Task Stack to determine which subtask to execute next and which sub-agent to invoke. An Assistant serves as the execution layer, grounding each selected task in a shared Workspace, retrieving the required assets and context, invoking the assigned sub-agent, and persisting the resulting artifacts. Execution capabilities are exposed through modular sub-agents with registered descriptors, allowing new sub-agents to be integrated without redesigning the orchestration workflow. To improve orchestration reliability, we fine-tune the Director via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for descriptor-conditioned task routing. Experiments show that FRAMEWORKERS outperforms strong LLM planners in routing accuracy, recovers reliably from runtime failures, generalizes to unseen sub-agents without retraining, and achieves higher end-to-end video quality and broader task coverage than fixed pipelines, single-agent systems, and prior multi-agent approaches.
The narrative quality of a video fundamentally determines its perceptual value. Although existing video generation methods can produce visually appealing content, they predominantly rely on sparse conditioning signals such as text prompts or first/last frames, which limits precise control over narrative structure and temporal pacing. In this paper, we propose SmartDirector, a framework that enhances the narrative capacity of video generation models through multiple keyframes. SmartDirector supports flexible generation scenarios including single-shot generation, multi-shot narrative synthesis, and video extension. The framework operates in two stages: Director-Gen generates a low-resolution video conditioned on the provided keyframes, and Director-SR refines the output by exploiting high-resolution keyframes as semantic anchors to recover fine-grained details. To enable robust multi-keyframe training, we construct a data pipeline that curates single-shot and multi-shot sequences from movies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SmartDirector substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. We will release the code to facilitate further research.