Re: Verse - Can Your VLM Read a Manga?
Abstract
Current Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate a critical gap between surface-level recognition and deep narrative reasoning when processing sequential visual sto-rytelling. Through a comprehensive investigation of manga narrative understanding, we reveal that while recent large multimodal models excel at individual panel interpretation, they systematically fail at temporal causality and cross-panel cohesion, core requirements for coherent story comprehension. We introduce a novel evaluation framework that combines fine-grained multimodal annotation, cross-modal embedding analysis, and retrieval-augmented assessment to systematically characterize these limitations. Our methodology includes (i) a rigorous annotation pro-tocol linking visual elements to narrative structure through aligned light novel text, (ii) comprehensive evaluation across multiple reasoning paradigms, including direct inference and retrieval-augmented generation, and (iii) cross-modal similarity analysis revealing fundamental misalignments in current VLMs' joint representations. Applying this framework to Re: Zero manga across 11 chapters with 308 annotated panels, we conduct the first systematic study of long-form narrative understanding in VLMs through three core evaluation axes: generative storytelling, contextual di-alogue grounding, and temporal reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that current models lack genuine story-level intelligence, struggling particularly with non-linear narratives,…
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