Evaluating Visual Narrative Coherence in Story Visualization via Diversified Storylines

AbstractStory visualization requires generating a coherent sequence of images that collectively form a narrative, yet existing evaluation metrics and datasets often overlook visual continuity and narrative diversity. In this paper, we introduce the Visual Context-Aware Metric for Story Visualization, which uses large vision-language models to jointly assess caption fidelity and inter-image consistency, achieving Spearman’s correlation comparable to human agreement on two benchmarks. Also, to address the shortcomings of narrowly defined datasets with low diversity, we propose a diffusion-augmented evaluation pipeline that blends diverse and controlled narrative elements at adjustable ratios, producing challenging evaluation sets. By combining VCMS with this pipeline, we provide a scalable, human-aligned framework for evaluating story visualization models.