SteinsGate: Adding Causality to Diffusions for Long Video Generation via Path Integral

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission18554 Authors

Keywords: Generative Models, Video Generation, Diffusion Guidance

Abstract: Video generation has advanced rapidly, but current models remain limited to short clips, far from the length and complexity of real-world narratives. Long video generation is thus both important and challenging. Existing approaches either attempt to extend the modeling length of video diffusion models directly or merge short clips via shared frames. However, due to the lack of temporal causality modeling for video data, they achieve only limited extensions, suffer from discontinuous or even contradictory actions, and fail to support flexible and fine-grained temporal control. Thus, we propose Instruct-Video-Continuation (InstructVC), combining Temporal Action Binding for fine-grained temporal control and Causal Video Continuation for natural long-term simulation. Temporal Action Binding decomposes complex long videos by temporal causality into scene descriptions and action sequences with predicted durations, while Causal Video Continuation autoregressively generates coherent video narratives from the text story. We further introduce SteinsGate, an inference-time instance of InstructVC that uses an MLLM for Temporal Action Binding and Video Path Integral to enforce causality between actions, converting a pre-trained TI2V diffusion model into an autoregressive video continuation model. Benchmark results demonstrate the advantages of SteinsGate and InstructVC in achieving accurate temporal control and generating natural, smooth multi-action long videos.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 18554