PRISM: A Benchmark for Programmatic Spatial-Temporal Reasoning

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 19 May 2026] PRISM: A Benchmark for Programmatic Spatial-Temporal Reasoning Qiran Zhang, Yuheng Wang, Runde Yang, Lin Wu, Jingru Fan, Shu Yao, Jie Zhang, Tianle Zhou, Huatao Li, Ruijie Shi, Yihan Li, Chen Qian Programmatic video generation through code offers geometric precision and temporal coherence beyond pixel-level diffusion models, yet rigorously evaluating whether language models can produce spatially correct animated outputs remains an open problem. We introduce PRISM, a large-scale benchmark of 10,372 human-calibrated instruction-code pairs (20 times larger than prior programmatic video generation benchmarks), grounded in real-world knowledge visualization scenarios across English and Chinese and spanning 437 subject categories. We further propose a funnel-style evaluation framework with four complementary metrics: Code-Level Reliability for executability, Spatial Reasoning for layout correctness over full animation sequences, and Prompt-Aware Dynamic Visual Complexity (PADVC) and Temporal Density (TD) for diagnosing dynamic expression and temporal activity. Systematic evaluation of seven mainstream LLMs reveals a striking Execution-Spatial Gap: the average drop from execution success rate to spatial pass rate is approximately 41%, showing that runnable code does not necessarily yield spatially coherent visual output. These findings show that programmatic video generation evaluation should go beyond executability. PRISM provides a principled benchmark for advancing spatially coherent code generation. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.19382 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.19382v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19382 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yuheng Wang [view email] [v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 05:28:54 UTC (2,454 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)