CompositionEvidence: Controlling Geometric Evidence for Cinematic Composition Reasoning with Frozen Vision-Language Models

Yichen He, Xin Huang, Yuxi Liu

Cinematic composition questions depend on in-frame geometry that vision-language models (VLMs) use inconsistently. External perception tools can expose this geometry, but naive prompt injection can overwrite useful visual predictions. On ShotBench composition, pre-question geometry reduces Qwen2.5-VL-7B from 49.5% to 46.3%; corrupted measurements lower it to 33.6%. CompositionEvidence derives nine reproducible features from frozen detection, depth, and line experts and supplies their shared 24-dimensional representation through two interfaces. A training-free channel appends gated neutral evidence after the question, reaching 56.2% (+6.7, exact McNemar p=0.0018) and 48.4% under corrupted evidence. A minimal-training channel maps the same representation to four soft tokens with a 7.37M-parameter projector while leaving the VLM frozen; it reaches 61.0% (+11.5). Across nine VLMs, including five commercial models queried through official provider APIs, zero-shot accuracy ranges from 43.8% to 63.0%, and the text channel changes it by +6.7 to -6.9 points; the highest baseline is among the regressions. The effect of explicit geometry depends on measurement reliability and on how the…