Beyond Rigid: Benchmarking Non-Rigid Video Editing

Abstract

As video generation models are increasingly expected to manipulate physical dynamics, there is a growing need to move evaluation beyond appearance fidelity and semantic alignment. Non-rigid video editing offers a uniquely revealing testbed, where distinct materials impose distinct physical constraints. In this paper, we introduce NRVBench, a diagnostic benchmark for non-rigid video editing, where the task is to modify deformable motion while preserving irrelevant regions and maintaining material-specific plausibility. NRVBench contains 180 curated videos across six physics-grounded categories, 2,340 fine-grained editing instructions, 360 multiple-choice questions, and pixel-accurate masks. We further propose NRVE-Acc, a structured VLM-based protocol that decomposes editing success into instruction following, material-aware deformation plausibility, and temporal coherence with motion cues. Experiments on representative inference-time video editing methods reveal a clear mismatch between conventional metrics and physics-aware perceptual editing success: methods that preserve appearance or achieve strong global alignment may still fail under non-rigid dynamics. We additionally introduce VM-Edit, a simple region-conditioned editing baseline that frees the foreground while locking the background, exposing the stability--plasticity trade-off.