cs.CVOct 11, 2026

EmoTrace-Bench: Diagnosing Emotional Expression in Text-to-Video Generation through Controlled Cues and Intensity

Authors: Yeheng Wang, Liudan Shi, Yi Zheng, Jingke Li, Shiyuan Liu, Xin Tao, Yuanxing Zhang, Guoyu Sun

Organizations: Communication University of China, Beijing, China · Kling Team, Beijing, China

Abstract

Text-to-video (T2V) models are increasingly used to generate videos with targeted emotional expressions, yet existing evaluation methods mainly rely on holistic video-text alignment and provide limited insight into whether failures arise from target-emotion expression, intensity control, or specific affective cues. We introduce EmoTrace-Bench, a fine-grained diagnostic benchmark that controls emotion intensity and selected affective cues in prompts and evaluates generated videos at multiple levels. EmoTrace-Bench contains 448 controlled prompts covering eight emotions, two intensity levels, and diverse cue conditions. Using 12 T2V models, we generate 5,376 videos and evaluate target-emotion presence, perceived intensity, and ten audiovisual dimensions of emotional expression with an automated evaluator calibrated and validated against human annotations on a subset of the data. Results reveal substantial differences across models and prompt designs. Prompts that explicitly describe a character's emotional reaction are followed more reliably than prompts that describe only events or scenes, whereas adding more affective cues or using more explicit cinematic audiovisual language does not consistently improve emotional generation. These results illustrate how aggregate alignment scores may overlook localized differences in target-emotion expression, intensity control, and cue realization. EmoTrace-Bench provides a traceable and interpretable framework for diagnosing emotional video generation without modifying existing generation pipelines, and we release the prompts and the automated evaluation rules.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables23 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. VTR-Bench: A Systematic Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Text Rendering in Video Generation

    Oct 1, 2026Yu Huang, Jungang Li, Zhiyuan Wang +8Agentic Video GenerationVideo Generation

  2. TextVBench: Evaluating Text Rendering and Preservation in Video Generation

    Oct 9, 2026Ruiqiang Zhang, Hengyi Wang, Chang Liu +3Video Generation EvaluationT2V Generation