cs.CVJul 30, 2026

RefCaptioner: Multi-Reference Image-Grounded Video Captioning

Authors: Tengfei LiuYang ShiYuran WangXiaohan ZhangYuqing WenYuqi TangQixun WangZhuoran Zhang+11 more

Organizations: PKU · Kling Team · NUS · NJU · HKUST(GZ) · CUHK · FDU · THU · Shanghai AI Lab · CASIA

Abstract

Existing video captioning models generate natural descriptions of video content but cannot explicitly ground local visual elements to multiple reference images. We introduce multi-reference image-grounded video captioning, a new task requiring factual video descriptions with phrase-level reference grounding, and propose RefCaptioner, a two-stage post-training framework for this task. RefCaptioner combines mixed-data SFT with Hierarchical Coverage-Discounted GRPO to jointly improve reference selection, phrase-level binding, distractor rejection, and cross-reference consistency while preserving general video-captioning ability. To support training, we construct a corpus containing 20,00020,000 videos and 171,354 reference images. We further introduce MRVBench, a benchmark for evaluating caption factuality and multi-reference grounding on both real-world and AI-generated videos. Experiments show that RefCaptioner achieves the best overall performance among the open-source models while remaining competitive on standard video captioning benchmarks. Human evaluation further confirms that its captions are preferred by annotators and enable more source-faithful video reconstruction with both open-source and proprietary video generators.

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