Megha Mariam K. M

Megha Mariam K. M, Aditya Arun, Zakaria Laskar et al.

Generative AI models, particularly Text-to-Video (T2V) systems, offer a promising avenue for transforming science education by automating the creation of engaging and intuitive visual explanations. In this work, we take a first step toward evaluating their potential in physics education by introducing a dedicated benchmark for explanatory video generation. The benchmark is designed to assess how well T2V models can convey core physics concepts through visual illustrations. Each physics concept in our benchmark is decomposed into granular teaching points, with each point accompanied by a carefully crafted prompt intended for visual explanation of the teaching point. T2V models are evaluated on their ability to generate accurate videos in response to these prompts. Our aim is to systematically explore the feasibility of using T2V models to generate high-quality, curriculum-aligned educational content-paving the way toward scalable, accessible, and personalized learning experiences powered by AI. Our evaluation reveals that current models produce visually coherent videos with smooth motion and minimal flickering, yet their conceptual accuracy is less reliable. Performance in areas such as mechanics, fluids, and optics is encouraging, but models struggle with electromagnetism and thermodynamics, where abstract interactions are harder to depict. These findings underscore the gap between visual quality and conceptual correctness in educational video generation. We hope this benchmark helps the community close that gap and move toward T2V systems that can deliver accurate, curriculum-aligned physics content at scale. The benchmark and accompanying codebase are publicly available at https://github.com/meghamariamkm/PhyEduVideo.

Megha Mariam K M, C. V. Jawahar

Imagine sitting in a presentation, trying to follow the speaker while simultaneously scanning the slides for relevant information. While the entire slide is visible, identifying the relevant regions can be challenging. As you focus on one part of the slide, the speaker moves on to a new sentence, leaving you scrambling to catch up visually. This constant back-and-forth creates a disconnect between what is being said and the most important visual elements, making it hard to absorb key details, especially in fast-paced or content-heavy presentations such as conference talks. This requires an understanding of slides, including text, graphics, and layout. We introduce a method that automatically identifies and highlights the most relevant slide regions based on the speaker's narrative. By analyzing spoken content and matching it with textual or graphical elements in the slides, our approach ensures better synchronization between what listeners hear and what they need to attend to. We explore different ways of solving this problem and assess their success and failure cases. Analyzing multimedia documents is emerging as a key requirement for seamless understanding of content-rich videos, such as educational videos and conference talks, by reducing cognitive strain and improving comprehension. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/meghamariamkm2002/Slide_Highlight

Megha Mariam K. M, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian, C. V. Jawahar

The communication of scientific knowledge has become increasingly multimodal, spanning text, visuals, and speech through materials such as research papers, slides, and recorded presentations. These different representations collectively convey a study's reasoning, results, and insights, offering complementary perspectives that enrich understanding. However, despite their shared purpose, such materials are rarely connected in a structured way. The absence of explicit links across formats makes it difficult to trace how concepts, visuals, and explanations correspond, limiting unified exploration and analysis of research content. To address this gap, we introduce the Multimodal Conference Dataset (MCD), the first benchmark that integrates research papers, presentation videos, explanatory videos, and slides from the same works. We evaluate a range of embedding-based and vision-language models to assess their ability to discover fine-grained cross-format correspondences, establishing the first systematic benchmark for this task. Our results show that vision-language models are robust but struggle with fine-grained alignment, while embedding-based models capture text-visual correspondences well but equations and symbolic content form distinct clusters in the embedding space. These findings highlight both the strengths and limitations of current approaches and point to key directions for future research in multimodal scientific understanding. To ensure reproducibility, we release the resources for MCD at https://github.com/meghamariamkm2002/MCD