The StoryFrames Dataset

StoryFrames is a human-annotated dataset created to enhance a model's capability of understanding and reasoning over sequences of images. It is specifically designed for tasks like generating a description for the next scene in a story based on previous visual and textual information. The dataset repurposes the StoryBench dataset, a video dataset originally designed to predict future frames of a video. StoryFrames subsamples frames from those videos and pairs them with annotations for the task of next-description prediction. Each "story" is a sample of the dataset and can vary in length and complexity.

The dataset contains 8,881 samples, divided into train and validation splits.

If you want to work with a specific context length (i.e., number of scenes per story), you can filter the dataset as follows:

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("ingoziegler/StoryFrames")

# to work with stories containing 3 scenes
ds_3 = ds.filter(lambda sample: sample["num_scenes"] == 3)

What Is a Story in StoryFrames?

• A story is a sequence of scenes: Each story is composed of multiple scenes, where each scene is a part of the overall narrative.

• Scenes consist of two main components:

  • Images: Each scene is made up of several frames (images) that have been subsampled from the original video.
  • Scene Description: There is a single textual description for each scene (i.e., one or more images) that captures the plot of the scene.

How Is the Data Organized?

• Temporal Markers:

  • start_times and end_times: These fields provide the time markers indicating when each scene begins and ends in the video. They define the boundaries of each scene.

• Frame Subsampling:

  • subsampled_frames_per_scene: For each scene, a list of frame timestamps is provided. Each timestamp is formatted to show the second and millisecond (for example, frame_sec.millisec would be frame_1.448629). These timestamps indicate which frames were selected from the scene.

• Image Data:

  • scenes: In a structure that mirrors the subsampled timestamps, this field contains the actual images that were extracted. The images are organized as a list of lists: each inner list corresponds to one scene and contains the images in the order they were sampled.

• Narrative Descriptions:

  • sentence_parts: This field contains a list of strings. Each string provides a description for one scene in the story. Even though a scene is made up of multiple images, the corresponding description captures the plot progression over all images of that scene.

Detailed Field Descriptions

• sentence_parts

  • Type: List[str]
  • A narrative breakdown where each entry describes one scene.

• start_times

  • List[float]
  • A list of timestamps marking the beginning of each scene.

• end_times

  • Type: List[float]
  • A list of timestamps marking the end of each scene.

• background_description

  • Type: str
  • A brief summary of the overall setting or background of the story.

• video_name

  • Type: str
  • The identifier or name of the source video.
  • This is not a unique identifier for stories as a video can contain multiple stories that are annotated separately.

• question_info

  • Type: str
  • Additional information used together with the video name to uniquely identify each story.

• story_id

  • Type: str
  • Automatically generated by combining video_name and question_info (e.g., "video_name---question_info") to create a unique identifier for each story.

• num_actors_in_video

  • Type: int
  • The number of actors present in the video.

• subsampled_frames_per_scene

  • Type: List[List[float]]
  • Each inner list contains the timestamps (formatted as frame_sec.millisec, e.g., frame_1.448629) for the frames that were selected from a scene.
  • Each position of the inner lists correspond to the position of the description in sentence_parts and scenes,
  • The number of inner lists corresponds to the number of available scenes, as marked in num_scenes.

• scenes

  • Type: List[List[Image]]
  • Each inner list holds the actual frames (images) that were subsampled from a scene.
  • The structure of this field directly corresponds to that of subsampled_frames_per_scene.
  • Each position of the inner lists correspond to the position of the description in sentence_parts and subsampled_frames_per_scene.

• num_scenes

  • Type: int
  • The total number of scenes in the story.

• caption

  • Type: str
  • An optional caption for the sample.
  • This may be empty if no caption was provided.

• sentence_parts_nocontext

  • Type: List[str]
  • A variant of the scene descriptions that excludes sequential context.
  • This may be empty if no annotation was provided.

Citation

The dataset was introduced as part of the following paper:

ImageChain: Advancing Sequential Image-to-Text Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

If you use it in your research or applications, please cite the following paper:

@misc{villegas2025imagechainadvancingsequentialimagetotext,
      title={ImageChain: Advancing Sequential Image-to-Text Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models}, 
      author={Danae Sánchez Villegas and Ingo Ziegler and Desmond Elliott},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2502.19409},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19409}, 
}