Text-to-image generation models have made significant progress in producing high-quality images from textual descriptions, yet they continue to struggle with maintaining subject consistency across multiple images, a fundamental requirement for visual storytelling. Existing methods attempt to address this by either fine-tuning models on large-scale story visualization datasets, which is resource-intensive, or by using training-free techniques that share information across generations, which still yield limited success. In this paper, we introduce a novel training-free sampling strategy called Zigzag Sampling with Asymmetric Prompts and Visual Sharing to enhance subject consistency in visual story generation. Our approach proposes a zigzag sampling mechanism that alternates between asymmetric prompting to retain subject characteristics, while a visual sharing module transfers visual cues across generated images to %further enforce consistency. Experimental results, based on both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluations, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous approaches in generating coherent and consistent visual stories. The code is available at https://github.com/Mingxiao-Li/Asymmetry-Zigzag-StoryDiffusion.
Story visualization, which aims to generate a sequence of visually coherent images aligning with a given narrative and reference images, has seen significant progress with recent advancements in generative models. To further enhance the performance of story visualization frameworks in real-world scenarios, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, ViStoryBench. We collect a diverse dataset encompassing various story types and artistic styles, ensuring models are evaluated across multiple dimensions such as different plots (e.g., comedy, horror) and visual aesthetics (e.g., anime, 3D renderings). ViStoryBench is carefully curated to balance narrative structures and visual elements, featuring stories with single and multiple protagonists to test models' ability to maintain character consistency. Additionally, it includes complex plots and intricate world-building to challenge models in generating accurate visuals. To ensure comprehensive comparisons, our benchmark incorporates a wide range of evaluation metrics assessing critical aspects. This structured and multifaceted framework enables researchers to thoroughly identify both the strengths and weaknesses of different models, fostering targeted improvements.
Open-ended story visualization is a challenging task that involves generating coherent image sequences from a given storyline. One of the main difficulties is maintaining character consistency while creating natural and contextually fitting scenes--an area where many existing methods struggle. In this paper, we propose an enhanced Transformer module that uses separate self attention and cross attention mechanisms, leveraging prior knowledge from pre-trained diffusion models to ensure logical scene creation. The isolated self attention mechanism improves character consistency by refining attention maps to reduce focus on irrelevant areas and highlight key features of the same character. Meanwhile, the isolated cross attention mechanism independently processes each character's features, avoiding feature fusion and further strengthening consistency. Notably, our method is training-free, allowing the continuous generation of new characters and storylines without re-tuning. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our approach outperforms current methods, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Recent advances in AI-driven storytelling have enhanced video generation and story visualization. However, translating dialogue-centric scripts into coherent storyboards remains a significant challenge due to limited script detail, inadequate physical context understanding, and the complexity of integrating cinematic principles. To address these challenges, we propose Dialogue Visualization, a novel task that transforms dialogue scripts into dynamic, multi-view storyboards. We introduce Dialogue Director, a training-free multimodal framework comprising a Script Director, Cinematographer, and Storyboard Maker. This framework leverages large multimodal models and diffusion-based architectures, employing techniques such as Chain-of-Thought reasoning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and multi-view synthesis to improve script understanding, physical context comprehension, and cinematic knowledge integration. Experimental results demonstrate that Dialogue Director outperforms state-of-the-art methods in script interpretation, physical world understanding, and cinematic principle application, significantly advancing the quality and controllability of dialogue-based story visualization.
Story visualization, the task of creating visual narratives from textual descriptions, has seen progress with text-to-image generation models. However, these models often lack effective control over character appearances and interactions, particularly in multi-character scenes. To address these limitations, we propose a new task: \textbf{customized manga generation} and introduce \textbf{DiffSensei}, an innovative framework specifically designed for generating manga with dynamic multi-character control. DiffSensei integrates a diffusion-based image generator with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that acts as a text-compatible identity adapter. Our approach employs masked cross-attention to seamlessly incorporate character features, enabling precise layout control without direct pixel transfer. Additionally, the MLLM-based adapter adjusts character features to align with panel-specific text cues, allowing flexible adjustments in character expressions, poses, and actions. We also introduce \textbf{MangaZero}, a large-scale dataset tailored to this task, containing 43,264 manga pages and 427,147 annotated panels, supporting the visualization of varied character interactions and movements across sequential frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffSensei outperforms existing models, marking a significant advancement in manga generation by enabling text-adaptable character customization. The project page is https://jianzongwu.github.io/projects/diffsensei/.
Story visualization has gained increasing attention in artificial intelligence. However, existing methods still struggle with maintaining a balance between character identity preservation and text-semantics alignment, largely due to a lack of detailed semantic modeling of the story scene. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph, namely Character Graph (\textbf{CG}), which comprehensively represents various story-related knowledge, including the characters, the attributes related to characters, and the relationship between characters. We then introduce StoryWeaver, an image generator that achieve Customization via Character Graph (\textbf{C-CG}), capable of consistent story visualization with rich text semantics. To further improve the multi-character generation performance, we incorporate knowledge-enhanced spatial guidance (\textbf{KE-SG}) into StoryWeaver to precisely inject character semantics into generation. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted using a new benchmark called TBC-Bench. The experiments confirm that our StoryWeaver excels not only in creating vivid visual story plots but also in accurately conveying character identities across various scenarios with considerable storage efficiency, \emph{e.g.}, achieving an average increase of +9.03\% DINO-I and +13.44\% CLIP-T. Furthermore, ablation experiments are conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed module. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/Aria-Zhangjl/StoryWeaver.
Story visualization, the task of generating coherent images based on a narrative, has seen significant advancements with the emergence of text-to-image models, particularly diffusion models. However, maintaining semantic consistency, generating high-quality fine-grained interactions, and ensuring computational feasibility remain challenging, especially in long story visualization (i.e., up to 100 frames). In this work, we propose a training-free and computationally efficient framework, termed Story-Adapter, to enhance the generative capability of long stories. Specifically, we propose an iterative paradigm to refine each generated image, leveraging both the text prompt and all generated images from the previous iteration. Central to our framework is a training-free global reference cross-attention module, which aggregates all generated images from the previous iteration to preserve semantic consistency across the entire story, while minimizing computational costs with global embeddings. This iterative process progressively optimizes image generation by repeatedly incorporating text constraints, resulting in more precise and fine-grained interactions. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of Story-Adapter in improving both semantic consistency and generative capability for fine-grained interactions, particularly in long story scenarios. The project page and associated code can be accessed via https://jwmao1.github.io/storyadapter .
Generating video stories from text prompts is a complex task. In addition to having high visual quality, videos need to realistically adhere to a sequence of text prompts whilst being consistent throughout the frames. Creating a benchmark for video generation requires data annotated over time, which contrasts with the single caption used often in video datasets. To fill this gap, we collect comprehensive human annotations on three existing datasets, and introduce StoryBench: a new, challenging multi-task benchmark to reliably evaluate forthcoming text-to-video models. Our benchmark includes three video generation tasks of increasing difficulty: action execution, where the next action must be generated starting from a conditioning video; story continuation, where a sequence of actions must be executed starting from a conditioning video; and story generation, where a video must be generated from only text prompts. We evaluate small yet strong text-to-video baselines, and show the benefits of training on story-like data algorithmically generated from existing video captions. Finally, we establish guidelines for human evaluation of video stories, and reaffirm the need of better automatic metrics for video generation. StoryBench aims at encouraging future research efforts in this exciting new area.
Story visualization aims to create visually compelling images or videos corresponding to textual narratives. Despite recent advances in diffusion models yielding promising results, existing methods still struggle to create a coherent sequence of subject-consistent frames based solely on a story. To this end, we propose DreamStory, an automatic open-domain story visualization framework by leveraging the LLMs and a novel multi-subject consistent diffusion model. DreamStory consists of (1) an LLM acting as a story director and (2) an innovative Multi-Subject consistent Diffusion model (MSD) for generating consistent multi-subject across the images. First, DreamStory employs the LLM to generate descriptive prompts for subjects and scenes aligned with the story, annotating each scene's subjects for subsequent subject-consistent generation. Second, DreamStory utilizes these detailed subject descriptions to create portraits of the subjects, with these portraits and their corresponding textual information serving as multimodal anchors (guidance). Finally, the MSD uses these multimodal anchors to generate story scenes with consistent multi-subject. Specifically, the MSD includes Masked Mutual Self-Attention (MMSA) and Masked Mutual Cross-Attention (MMCA) modules. MMSA and MMCA modules ensure appearance and semantic consistency with reference images and text, respectively. Both modules employ masking mechanisms to prevent subject blending. To validate our approach and promote progress in story visualization, we established a benchmark, DS-500, which can assess the overall performance of the story visualization framework, subject-identification accuracy, and the consistency of the generation model. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of DreamStory in both subjective and objective evaluations. Please visit our project homepage at https://dream-xyz.github.io/dreamstory.
Visual storytelling involves generating a sequence of coherent frames from a textual storyline while maintaining consistency in characters and scenes. Existing autoregressive methods, which rely on previous frame-sentence pairs, struggle with high memory usage, slow generation speeds, and limited context integration. To address these issues, we propose ContextualStory, a novel framework designed to generate coherent story frames and extend frames for visual storytelling. ContextualStory utilizes Spatially-Enhanced Temporal Attention to capture spatial and temporal dependencies, handling significant character movements effectively. Additionally, we introduce a Storyline Contextualizer to enrich context in storyline embedding, and a StoryFlow Adapter to measure scene changes between frames for guiding the model. Extensive experiments on PororoSV and FlintstonesSV datasets demonstrate that ContextualStory significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods in both story visualization and continuation. Code is available at https://github.com/sixiaozheng/ContextualStory.
Recent research showcases the considerable potential of conditional diffusion models for generating consistent stories. However, current methods, which predominantly generate stories in an autoregressive and excessively caption-dependent manner, often underrate the contextual consistency and relevance of frames during sequential generation. To address this, we propose a novel Rich-contextual Conditional Diffusion Models (RCDMs), a two-stage approach designed to enhance story generation's semantic consistency and temporal consistency. Specifically, in the first stage, the frame-prior transformer diffusion model is presented to predict the frame semantic embedding of the unknown clip by aligning the semantic correlations between the captions and frames of the known clip. The second stage establishes a robust model with rich contextual conditions, including reference images of the known clip, the predicted frame semantic embedding of the unknown clip, and text embeddings of all captions. By jointly injecting these rich contextual conditions at the image and feature levels, RCDMs can generate semantic and temporal consistency stories. Moreover, RCDMs can generate consistent stories with a single forward inference compared to autoregressive models. Our qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our proposed RCDMs outperform in challenging scenarios. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/RCDMs.
Diffusion-based models for story visualization have shown promise in generating content-coherent images for storytelling tasks. However, how to effectively integrate new characters into existing narratives while maintaining character consistency remains an open problem, particularly with limited data. Two major limitations hinder the progress: (1) the absence of a suitable benchmark due to potential character leakage and inconsistent text labeling, and (2) the challenge of distinguishing between new and old characters, leading to ambiguous results. To address these challenges, we introduce the NewEpisode benchmark, comprising refined datasets designed to evaluate generative models' adaptability in generating new stories with fresh characters using just a single example story. The refined dataset involves refined text prompts and eliminates character leakage. Additionally, to mitigate the character confusion of generated results, we propose EpicEvo, a method that customizes a diffusion-based visual story generation model with a single story featuring the new characters seamlessly integrating them into established character dynamics. EpicEvo introduces a novel adversarial character alignment module to align the generated images progressively in the diffusive process, with exemplar images of new characters, while applying knowledge distillation to prevent forgetting of characters and background details. Our evaluation quantitatively demonstrates that EpicEvo outperforms existing baselines on the NewEpisode benchmark, and qualitative studies confirm its superior customization of visual story generation in diffusion models. In summary, EpicEvo provides an effective way to incorporate new characters using only one example story, unlocking new possibilities for applications such as serialized cartoons.
Story visualization aims to generate a series of realistic and coherent images based on a storyline. Current models adopt a frame-by-frame architecture by transforming the pre-trained text-to-image model into an auto-regressive manner. Although these models have shown notable progress, there are still three flaws. 1) The unidirectional generation of auto-regressive manner restricts the usability in many scenarios. 2) The additional introduced story history encoders bring an extremely high computational cost. 3) The story visualization and continuation models are trained and inferred independently, which is not user-friendly. To these ends, we propose a bidirectional, unified, and efficient framework, namely StoryImager. The StoryImager enhances the storyboard generative ability inherited from the pre-trained text-to-image model for a bidirectional generation. Specifically, we introduce a Target Frame Masking Strategy to extend and unify different story image generation tasks. Furthermore, we propose a Frame-Story Cross Attention Module that decomposes the cross attention for local fidelity and global coherence. Moreover, we design a Contextual Feature Extractor to extract contextual information from the whole storyline. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of our StoryImager. The code is available at https://github.com/tobran/StoryImager.
Story Visualization (SV) is a challenging generative vision task, that requires both visual quality and consistency between different frames in generated image sequences. Previous approaches either employ some kind of memory mechanism to maintain context throughout an auto-regressive generation of the image sequence, or model the generation of the characters and their background separately, to improve the rendering of characters. On the contrary, we embrace a completely parallel transformer-based approach, exclusively relying on Cross-Attention with past and future captions to achieve consistency. Additionally, we propose a Character Guidance technique to focus on the generation of characters in an implicit manner, by forming a combination of text-conditional and character-conditional logits in the logit space. We also employ a caption-augmentation technique, carried out by a Large Language Model (LLM), to enhance the robustness of our approach. The combination of these methods culminates into state-of-the-art (SOTA) results over various metrics in the most prominent SV benchmark (Pororo-SV), attained with constraint resources while achieving superior computational complexity compared to previous arts. The validity of our quantitative results is supported by a human survey.
Text-to-image models offer a new level of creative flexibility by allowing users to guide the image generation process through natural language. However, using these models to consistently portray the same subject across diverse prompts remains challenging. Existing approaches fine-tune the model to teach it new words that describe specific user-provided subjects or add image conditioning to the model. These methods require lengthy per-subject optimization or large-scale pre-training. Moreover, they struggle to align generated images with text prompts and face difficulties in portraying multiple subjects. Here, we present ConsiStory, a training-free approach that enables consistent subject generation by sharing the internal activations of the pretrained model. We introduce a subject-driven shared attention block and correspondence-based feature injection to promote subject consistency between images. Additionally, we develop strategies to encourage layout diversity while maintaining subject consistency. We compare ConsiStory to a range of baselines, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on subject consistency and text alignment, without requiring a single optimization step. Finally, ConsiStory can naturally extend to multi-subject scenarios, and even enable training-free personalization for common objects.
The state-of-the-art methods for story visualization demonstrate a significant demand for training data and storage, as well as limited flexibility in story presentation, thereby rendering them impractical for real-world applications. We introduce CogCartoon, a practical story visualization method based on pre-trained diffusion models. To alleviate dependence on data and storage, we propose an innovative strategy of character-plugin generation that can represent a specific character as a compact 316 KB plugin by using a few training samples. To facilitate enhanced flexibility, we employ a strategy of plugin-guided and layout-guided inference, enabling users to seamlessly incorporate new characters and custom layouts into the generated image results at their convenience. We have conducted comprehensive qualitative and quantitative studies, providing compelling evidence for the superiority of CogCartoon over existing methodologies. Moreover, CogCartoon demonstrates its power in tackling challenging tasks, including long story visualization and realistic style story visualization.
Story Visualization aims to generate images aligned with story prompts, reflecting the coherence of storybooks through visual consistency among characters and scenes.Whereas current approaches exclusively concentrate on characters and neglect the visual consistency among contextually correlated scenes, resulting in independent character images without inter-image coherence.To tackle this issue, we propose a new presentation form for Story Visualization called Storyboard, inspired by film-making, as illustrated in Fig.1.Specifically, a Storyboard unfolds a story into visual representations scene by scene. Within each scene in Storyboard, characters engage in activities at the same location, necessitating both visually consistent scenes and characters.For Storyboard, we design a general framework coined as Make-A-Storyboard that applies disentangled control over the consistency of contextual correlated characters and scenes and then merge them to form harmonized images.Extensive experiments demonstrate 1) Effectiveness.the effectiveness of the method in story alignment, character consistency, and scene correlation; 2) Generalization. Our method could be seamlessly integrated into mainstream Image Customization methods, empowering them with the capability of story visualization.
Recent generative models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating realistic and visually pleasing images grounded on textual prompts. Nevertheless, a significant challenge remains in applying these models for the more intricate task of story visualization. Since it requires resolving pronouns (he, she, they) in the frame descriptions, i.e., anaphora resolution, and ensuring consistent characters and background synthesis across frames. Yet, the emerging Large Language Model (LLM) showcases robust reasoning abilities to navigate through ambiguous references and process extensive sequences. Therefore, we introduce \textbf{StoryGPT-V}, which leverages the merits of the latent diffusion (LDM) and LLM to produce images with consistent and high-quality characters grounded on given story descriptions. First, we train a character-aware LDM, which takes character-augmented semantic embedding as input and includes the supervision of the cross-attention map using character segmentation masks, aiming to enhance character generation accuracy and faithfulness. In the second stage, we enable an alignment between the output of LLM and the character-augmented embedding residing in the input space of the first-stage model. This harnesses the reasoning ability of LLM to address ambiguous references and the comprehension capability to memorize the context. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two visual story visualization benchmarks. Our model reports superior quantitative results and consistently generates accurate characters of remarkable quality with low memory consumption. Our code will be made publicly available.
Story visualization aims to generate a series of images that match the story described in texts, and it requires the generated images to satisfy high quality, alignment with the text description, and consistency in character identities. Given the complexity of story visualization, existing methods drastically simplify the problem by considering only a few specific characters and scenarios, or requiring the users to provide per-image control conditions such as sketches. However, these simplifications render these methods incompetent for real applications. To this end, we propose an automated story visualization system that can effectively generate diverse, high-quality, and consistent sets of story images, with minimal human interactions. Specifically, we utilize the comprehension and planning capabilities of large language models for layout planning, and then leverage large-scale text-to-image models to generate sophisticated story images based on the layout. We empirically find that sparse control conditions, such as bounding boxes, are suitable for layout planning, while dense control conditions, e.g., sketches and keypoints, are suitable for generating high-quality image content. To obtain the best of both worlds, we devise a dense condition generation module to transform simple bounding box layouts into sketch or keypoint control conditions for final image generation, which not only improves the image quality but also allows easy and intuitive user interactions. In addition, we propose a simple yet effective method to generate multi-view consistent character images, eliminating the reliance on human labor to collect or draw character images.
Recent advances in text-to-image generation models have unlocked vast potential for visual creativity. However, the users that use these models struggle with the generation of consistent characters, a crucial aspect for numerous real-world applications such as story visualization, game development, asset design, advertising, and more. Current methods typically rely on multiple pre-existing images of the target character or involve labor-intensive manual processes. In this work, we propose a fully automated solution for consistent character generation, with the sole input being a text prompt. We introduce an iterative procedure that, at each stage, identifies a coherent set of images sharing a similar identity and extracts a more consistent identity from this set. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates that our method strikes a better balance between prompt alignment and identity consistency compared to the baseline methods, and these findings are reinforced by a user study. To conclude, we showcase several practical applications of our approach.