VC-Inspector: Advancing Reference-free Evaluation of Video Captions with Factual Analy

We propose VC-Inspector, a lightweight, open-source large multimodal model (LMM) for reference-free evaluation of video captions, with a focus on factual accuracy. Unlike existing metrics that suffer from limited context handling, weak factuality assessment, or reliance on proprietary services, VC-Inspector offers a reproducible, fact-aware alternative that aligns closely with human judgments. To enable robust training and interpretable evaluation, we introduce a systematic approach for generating captions with controllable errors, paired with graded quality scores and explanatory annotations. Experiments show that VC-Inspector achieves state-of-the-art correlation with human judgments, generalizing across diverse domains (e.g., VATEX-Eval, Flickr8K-Expert, and Flickr8K-CF benchmarks) and revealing the potential for caption improvement.