Story-Adapter: A Training-free Iterative Framework for Long Story Visualization

Jiawei Mao, Xiaoke Huang, Yunfei Xie, Yuanqi Chang, Mude Hui, Bingjie Xu, Yuyin Zhou

Keywords: story visualization; diffusion model; subject-consistent image generation

Abstract: 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 crossattention 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.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

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Submission Number: 966