FlowCred: Hierarchical Credit Assignment and Functional Coordination for Joint Text-to-Video Post-Training
Organizations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University · KlingAI · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · South China University of Technology ·
Abstract
Prompt optimization and generator post-training are two complementary ways to improve text-to-video (T2V) generation, and recent systems increasingly train both modules jointly. However, optimizing a prompt policy and a video generator from the same terminal reward creates two ambiguities: prompt quality is confounded with stochastic generation, and the two modules may realize overlapping local improvements. We introduce FlowCred, a two-level framework for joint T2V post-training. First, hierarchical credit assignment uses matched prompt-seed rollout grids to separate prompt-level credit from prompt-conditioned generator residuals under shared randomness. Second, functional coordination probes alternative current-policy prompts at states from actual generation trajectories, providing generator-aware evidence for prompt optimization while selectively attenuating generator updates already supported by conditioning changes. Across multiple T2V benchmarks, FlowCred consistently improves matched joint-training baselines. On LTX-2.5, FlowCred improves a strictly matched joint-training control from 61.47 to 64.46 on T2V-CompBench and from 55.58 to 58.08 on StoryEval, without increasing decoded-video or reward-model-call budgets. Factorial and realized-update analyses show complementary contributions from prompt shaping and generator routing, while human evaluation and transfer across backbones and updater families provide further supporting evidence.
Figures & tables
| Method | VBench | VBench-2.0 | T2V-CompBench | StoryEval |
| Frozen / interface references | ||||
| Raw prompt | 78.14 | 54.52 | 46.52 | 37.88 |
| Official LTX-2.5 prompt enhancer | 84.92 | 61.36 | 57.48 | 51.63 |
| Single-side adaptation | ||||
| Prompt-A-Video | 85.63 | 62.18 | 58.87 | 52.96 |
| VPO | 85.44 | 64.06 | 59.54 | 53.61 |
| Diagnostic | Reference | Hierarchical design | Result |
| Generator-advantage variance | Global LOO | Prompt-conditioned LOO | |
| Prompt-credit variance | Independent seeds | Matched seeds | |
| T2V-CompBench | Independent seeds | Matched seeds |
| Prompt shaping | Generator routing | VBench | StoryEval | T2V-CompBench |
| – | – | 86.91 (0.14) | 56.71 (0.27) | 62.63 (0.32) |
| – | 87.20 (0.15) | 57.36 (0.28) | 63.40 (0.34) | |
| – | 87.29 (0.13) | 57.18 (0.26) | 63.67 (0.31) | |
| 87.56 (0.12) | 58.08 (0.24) | 64.46 (0.29) |
| Setting | VBench | T2V-CompBench | StoryEval |
| LTX-2.5 / Flow-GRPO | +0.65 | +1.83 | +1.37 |
| HunyuanVideo-1.5 / Flow-GRPO | +0.57 | +1.22 | +1.09 |
| LTX-2.5 / RVM | +0.52 | +1.29 | +1.15 |
| LTX-2.5 / Diffusion-DRF | +0.41 | +0.97 | +0.79 |
Appendix figures & tables16 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Component | Setting | Role in the comparison |
| Prompt candidates | four current-policy actions per request | |
| Matched seeds | same initial latent and stochastic transition stream per seed across candidates | |
| Decoded rollouts | 16/request | held fixed across the central chain |
| Generator backend | Flow-GRPO | base reward optimizer |
| Generator trainable set | fixed across generator-training rows | Full changes routing, not which generator parameters are trainable |
| Joint training rounds | 500 | global batch 2; 1,000 request draws from the shared 8k pool |
| Component | Public checkpoint / signal | Video input | Weight | ||
| KlingTeam/VideoReward , Text Alignment | native sampler | 0.35 | 0.42 | 0.17 | |
| zhiqiulin/clip-flant5-xxl , VQAScore | 8-frame mean | 0.30 | 0.63 | 0.15 | |
| TIGER-Lab/VideoScore-v1.1 , TC+T2V align | native sampler | 0.25 | 2.71 | 0.39 | |
| KlingTeam/VideoReward , VQ+MQ mean | native sampler | 0.10 | 0.56 | 0.16 |
| System | Prompt side | Generator side | Additional supervision | Training form |
| PromptRL | trainable LM refiner | Flow-GRPO | none | online shared-terminal-reward joint update |
| UniGRPO | trainable text policy | Flow-GRPO | none | online group-relative joint policy optimization |
| CAPE-T2V | Anchored PE | DiT fine-tuning | 54k video-derived captions | sequential two-sided conditioning alignment |
| FlowCred | Qwen3.5-9B policy | Flow-GRPO | none | online hierarchical credit + functional coordination |
| Benchmark | Metric | Base | Prompt-only | Global-LOO | Hier. credit | Full |
| VBench | Total | 78.14 | 86.97 | 86.49 | 86.91 | 87.56 |
| VBench-2.0 | Overall | 54.52 | 62.84 | 63.41 | 63.92 | 64.73 |
| T2V-CompBench | Overall | 46.52 | 60.28 | 61.47 | 62.63 | 64.46 |
| StoryEval | Overall | 37.88 | 54.37 | 55.58 | 56.71 | 58.08 |
| Prompt shaping | Generator routing | VBench | StoryEval | T2V-CompBench |
| – | – | 86.91 (0.14) | 56.71 (0.27) | 62.63 (0.32) |
| – | 87.20 (0.15) | 57.36 (0.28) | 63.40 (0.34) | |
| – | 87.29 (0.13) | 57.18 (0.26) | 63.67 (0.31) | |
| 87.56 (0.12) | 58.08 (0.24) | 64.46 (0.29) |
| Diagnostic | Raw request | Prompt-only | HC | Full |
| Median tokens | 18 | 111 | 117 | 120 |
| P90 tokens | 31 | 149 | 153 | 157 |
| Intent-filter rejection | – | 4.3% | 4.7% | 4.5% |
| Blind semantic drift ( ) | – | 7/200 | 5/200 | 5/200 |
| Method / within-setting contrast | VBench | T2V- CompBench | StoryEval |
| HunyuanVideo-1.5 / Flow-GRPO | |||
| Matched Global-LOO | 84.67 | 55.34 | 55.12 |
| Hier. credit | 84.96 | 55.89 | 56.04 |
| Full | 85.53 | 57.11 | 57.13 |
| LTX-2.5 / RVM | |||
| Hier. credit | 86.39 | 61.28 | 56.18 |
| Quantity | Hierarchical credit | Full |
| Decoded videos / request | 16 | 16 |
| Reward-model calls / request | 16 | 16 |
| Accepted support prompts / request | 0 | 96 |
| Same-state transition probe forwards | 0 | 144 |
| Videos/request | PromptRL | Global-LOO | Hier. credit | Full | Full HC | |
| 2 | 8 | 59.74 | 60.21 | 61.11 | 63.18 | +2.07 |
| 4 | 16 | 61.06 | 61.47 | 62.63 | 64.46 | +1.83 |
| 8 | 32 | 62.11 | 62.38 | 63.34 | 64.87 | +1.53 |
| Metric | Rep. A | Rep. B | Rep. C |
| VBench | 0.59 | 0.69 | 0.67 |
| VBench-2.0 | 0.72 | 0.87 | 0.84 |
| T2V-CompBench | 1.62 | 1.88 | 1.99 |
| StoryEval | 1.16 | 1.43 | 1.52 |
| Training variant | Generator supported overlap | |
| Hierarchical credit | 0.29 | 0.487 |
| Prompt shaping only | 0.55 | 0.471 |
| Generator routing only | 0.30 | 0.281 |
| Full | 0.61 | 0.264 |
T2V Generation
Text-to-video generation creates moving visual scenes from natural-language prompts, with growing control over motion, identity, events, and style.
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