StoryWeaver: A Unified World Model for Knowledge-Enhanced Story Character Customization

Jinlu Zhang, Jiji Tang, Rongsheng Zhang, Tangjie Lv, Xiaoshuai Sun

Abstract: 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 (CG), which represents various story-related knowledge, including the characters, their attributes and the relationship. We then introduce StoryWeaver, an image generator that achieves Customization via Character-Graph (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 (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, 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 each proposed module.