Stefano Petrangeli
Author directory2026
CamPilot: A Multi-Agent Cinematic Assistant for Camera-Controlled Movie Generation
Yang Wu | Stefano Petrangeli | Ishita Dasgupta | Yu Shen
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
Yang Wu | Stefano Petrangeli | Ishita Dasgupta | Yu Shen
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into video generation has enabled rapid text-to-video creation and improved visual quality. However, it still falls short of professional filmmaking, where cinematographic language is less refined than human-crafted camera work and multi-shot continuity remains challenging. To address these limitations, we introduce CamPilot, a multi-agent framework that integrates cinematographic planning and camera-work control to produce more coherent, logically structured, and human-aesthetic movies. CamPilot adopts a GRPO-based learning paradigm to learn camera work planning from 14K real-world professional movies, internalizing motion patterns and composition principles that support reasoning over shooting techniques (e.g., camera angle, motion, and focal behavior) and cross-shot relationships for controllable camera-viewpoint generation. Multiple agents further collaborate and evolve to improve overall output quality. To support this work and further studies in this domain, we establish CamEval, a benchmark for evaluating camera work quality and cinematic engagement. Empirical results show that CamPilot outperforms state-of-the-art text-to-movie generation methods on cinematographic control and quality, highlighting the impact of professional camera design on movie generation.
From Pixels to Policies: Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in Language Models for Content-Aware Layout Design
Sha Li | Stefano Petrangeli | Yu Shen | Xiang Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Sha Li | Stefano Petrangeli | Yu Shen | Xiang Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
We introduce LaySPA, a reinforcement learning framework that equips large language models (LLMs) with explicit and interpretable spatial reasoning for content-aware graphic layout design. LaySPA addresses two key challenges: LLMs’ limited spatial reasoning and the lack of transparency in design decision making. Instead of operating at the pixel level, we reformulate layout design as a policy learning problem over a structured textual spatial environment that explicitly encodes canvas geometry, element attributes, and inter-element relationships. LaySPA produces dual-level outputs comprising interpretable reasoning traces and structured layout specifications, enabling transparent and controllable design decision making. Layout design policy is optimized via a multi-objective spatial critique that decomposes layout quality into geometric validity, relational coherence, and aesthetic consistency, and is trained using relative group optimization to stabilize learning in open-ended design spaces. Experiments demonstrate that LaySPA improves structural validity and visual quality, outperforming larger proprietary LLMs and achieving performance comparable to specialized state-of-the-art layout generators while requiring fewer annotated samples.
2025
VISIAR: Empower MLLM for Visual Story Ideation
Zhaoyang Xia | Somdeb Sarkhel | Mehrab Tanjim | Stefano Petrangeli | Ishita Dasgupta | Yuxiao Chen | Jinxuan Xu | Di Liu | Saayan Mitra | Dimitris N. Metaxas
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Zhaoyang Xia | Somdeb Sarkhel | Mehrab Tanjim | Stefano Petrangeli | Ishita Dasgupta | Yuxiao Chen | Jinxuan Xu | Di Liu | Saayan Mitra | Dimitris N. Metaxas
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Ideation, the process of forming ideas from concepts, is a big part of the content creation process. However, the noble goal of helping visual content creators by suggesting meaningful sequences of visual assets from a limited collection is challenging. It requires a nuanced understanding of visual assets and the integration of open-world knowledge to support creative exploration. Despite its importance, this task has yet to be explored fully in existing literature. To fill this gap, we propose Visual Story Ideation, a novel and underexplored task focused on the automated selection and arrangement of visual assets into coherent sequences that convey expressive storylines.We also present VISIAR, Visual Ideation through Sequence Integration and Asset Rearrangement, a robust framework leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), and a novel Story Graph mechanism. Our framework operates in three key stages: visual content understanding, candidate asset selection, and asset rearrangement via MLLMs. In addition, we curated a new benchmark dataset, called VTravel, to evaluate our methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.User studies and GPT-as-the-judge evaluation show that our approach surpasses GPT-4o based baseline by an average of 33.5% and 18.5% across three different metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework for generating compelling visual stories.