Daily Papers

Current video generation techniques excel at single-shot clips but struggle to produce narrative multi-shot videos, which require flexible shot arrangement, coherent narrative, and controllability beyond text prompts. To tackle these challenges, we propose MultiShotMaster, a framework for highly controllable multi-shot video generation. We extend a pretrained single-shot model by integrating two novel variants of RoPE. First, we introduce Multi-Shot Narrative RoPE, which applies explicit phase shift at shot transitions, enabling flexible shot arrangement while preserving the temporal narrative order. Second, we design Spatiotemporal Position-Aware RoPE to incorporate reference tokens and grounding signals, enabling spatiotemporal-grounded reference injection. In addition, to overcome data scarcity, we establish an automated data annotation pipeline to extract multi-shot videos, captions, cross-shot grounding signals and reference images. Our framework leverages the intrinsic architectural properties to support multi-shot video generation, featuring text-driven inter-shot consistency, customized subject with motion control, and background-driven customized scene. Both shot count and duration are flexibly configurable. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and outstanding controllability of our framework.

Multi-shot video generation is crucial for long narrative storytelling, yet current bidirectional architectures suffer from limited interactivity and high latency. We propose ShotStream, a novel causal multi-shot architecture that enables interactive storytelling and efficient on-the-fly frame generation. By reformulating the task as next-shot generation conditioned on historical context, ShotStream allows users to dynamically instruct ongoing narratives via streaming prompts. We achieve this by first fine-tuning a text-to-video model into a bidirectional next-shot generator, which is then distilled into a causal student via Distribution Matching Distillation. To overcome the challenges of inter-shot consistency and error accumulation inherent in autoregressive generation, we introduce two key innovations. First, a dual-cache memory mechanism preserves visual coherence: a global context cache retains conditional frames for inter-shot consistency, while a local context cache holds generated frames within the current shot for intra-shot consistency. And a RoPE discontinuity indicator is employed to explicitly distinguish the two caches to eliminate ambiguity. Second, to mitigate error accumulation, we propose a two-stage distillation strategy. This begins with intra-shot self-forcing conditioned on ground-truth historical shots and progressively extends to inter-shot self-forcing using self-generated histories, effectively bridging the train-test gap. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShotStream generates coherent multi-shot videos with sub-second latency, achieving 16 FPS on a single GPU. It matches or exceeds the quality of slower bidirectional models, paving the way for real-time interactive storytelling. Training and inference code, as well as the models, are available on our

Storytelling in real-world videos often unfolds through multiple shots -- discontinuous yet semantically connected clips that together convey a coherent narrative. However, existing multi-shot video generation (MSV) methods struggle to effectively model long-range cross-shot context, as they rely on limited temporal windows or single keyframe conditioning, leading to degraded performance under complex narratives. In this work, we propose OneStory, enabling global yet compact cross-shot context modeling for consistent and scalable narrative generation. OneStory reformulates MSV as a next-shot generation task, enabling autoregressive shot synthesis while leveraging pretrained image-to-video (I2V) models for strong visual conditioning. We introduce two key modules: a Frame Selection module that constructs a semantically-relevant global memory based on informative frames from prior shots, and an Adaptive Conditioner that performs importance-guided patchification to generate compact context for direct conditioning. We further curate a high-quality multi-shot dataset with referential captions to mirror real-world storytelling patterns, and design effective training strategies under the next-shot paradigm. Finetuned from a pretrained I2V model on our curated 60K dataset, OneStory achieves state-of-the-art narrative coherence across diverse and complex scenes in both text- and image-conditioned settings, enabling controllable and immersive long-form video storytelling.

Current video generation models excel at generating short clips but still struggle with creating multi-shot, movie-like videos. Existing models trained on large-scale data on the back of rich computational resources are unsurprisingly inadequate for maintaining a logical storyline and visual consistency across multiple shots of a cohesive script since they are often trained with a single-shot objective. To this end, we propose VideoGen-of-Thought (VGoT), a collaborative and training-free architecture designed specifically for multi-shot video generation. VGoT is designed with three goals in mind as follows. Multi-Shot Video Generation: We divide the video generation process into a structured, modular sequence, including (1) Script Generation, which translates a curt story into detailed prompts for each shot; (2) Keyframe Generation, responsible for creating visually consistent keyframes faithful to character portrayals; and (3) Shot-Level Video Generation, which transforms information from scripts and keyframes into shots; (4) Smoothing Mechanism that ensures a consistent multi-shot output. Reasonable Narrative Design: Inspired by cinematic scriptwriting, our prompt generation approach spans five key domains, ensuring logical consistency, character development, and narrative flow across the entire video. Cross-Shot Consistency: We ensure temporal and identity consistency by leveraging identity-preserving (IP) embeddings across shots, which are automatically created from the narrative. Additionally, we incorporate a cross-shot smoothing mechanism, which integrates a reset boundary that effectively combines latent features from adjacent shots, resulting in smooth transitions and maintaining visual coherence throughout the video. Our experiments demonstrate that VGoT surpasses existing video generation methods in producing high-quality, coherent, multi-shot videos.

Visual storytelling requires generating multi-shot videos with cinematic quality and long-range consistency. Inspired by human memory, we propose StoryMem, a paradigm that reformulates long-form video storytelling as iterative shot synthesis conditioned on explicit visual memory, transforming pre-trained single-shot video diffusion models into multi-shot storytellers. This is achieved by a novel Memory-to-Video (M2V) design, which maintains a compact and dynamically updated memory bank of keyframes from historical generated shots. The stored memory is then injected into single-shot video diffusion models via latent concatenation and negative RoPE shifts with only LoRA fine-tuning. A semantic keyframe selection strategy, together with aesthetic preference filtering, further ensures informative and stable memory throughout generation. Moreover, the proposed framework naturally accommodates smooth shot transitions and customized story generation applications. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce ST-Bench, a diverse benchmark for multi-shot video storytelling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StoryMem achieves superior cross-shot consistency over previous methods while preserving high aesthetic quality and prompt adherence, marking a significant step toward coherent minute-long video storytelling.

Current autoregressive video diffusion models are constrained by three core bottlenecks: (i) the finite temporal horizon imposed by the base model's 3D Rotary Positional Embedding (3D-RoPE), (ii) slow prompt responsiveness in maintaining fine-grained action control during long-form rollouts, and (iii) the inability to realize discontinuous cinematic transitions within a single generation stream. We introduce infty-RoPE, a unified inference-time framework that addresses all three limitations through three interconnected components: Block-Relativistic RoPE, KV Flush, and RoPE Cut. Block-Relativistic RoPE reformulates temporal encoding as a moving local reference frame, where each newly generated latent block is rotated relative to the base model's maximum frame horizon while earlier blocks are rotated backward to preserve relative temporal geometry. This relativistic formulation eliminates fixed temporal positions, enabling continuous video generation far beyond the base positional limits. To obtain fine-grained action control without re-encoding, KV Flush renews the KV cache by retaining only two latent frames, the global sink and the last generated latent frame, thereby ensuring immediate prompt responsiveness. Finally, RoPE Cut introduces controlled discontinuities in temporal RoPE coordinates, enabling multi-cut scene transitions within a single continuous rollout. Together, these components establish infty-RoPE as a training-free foundation for infinite-horizon, controllable, and cinematic video diffusion. Comprehensive experiments show that infty-RoPE consistently surpasses previous autoregressive models in overall VBench scores.

Text-driven video generation has democratized film creation, but camera control in cinematic multi-shot scenarios remains a significant block. Implicit textual prompts lack precision, while explicit trajectory conditioning imposes prohibitive manual overhead and often triggers execution failures in current models. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a data-centric paradigm shift, positing that aligned (Caption, Trajectory, Video) triplets form an inherent joint distribution that can connect automated plotting and precise execution. Guided by this insight, we present ShotVerse, a "Plan-then-Control" framework that decouples generation into two collaborative agents: a VLM (Vision-Language Model)-based Planner that leverages spatial priors to obtain cinematic, globally aligned trajectories from text, and a Controller that renders these trajectories into multi-shot video content via a camera adapter. Central to our approach is the construction of a data foundation: we design an automated multi-shot camera calibration pipeline aligns disjoint single-shot trajectories into a unified global coordinate system. This facilitates the curation of ShotVerse-Bench, a high-fidelity cinematic dataset with a three-track evaluation protocol that serves as the bedrock for our framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShotVerse effectively bridges the gap between unreliable textual control and labor-intensive manual plotting, achieving superior cinematic aesthetics and generating multi-shot videos that are both camera-accurate and cross-shot consistent.

We present a node-based storytelling system for multimodal content generation. The system represents stories as graphs of nodes that can be expanded, edited, and iteratively refined through direct user edits and natural-language prompts. Each node can integrate text, images, audio, and video, allowing creators to compose multimodal narratives. A task selection agent routes between specialized generative tasks that handle story generation, node structure reasoning, node diagram formatting, and context generation. The interface supports targeted editing of individual nodes, automatic branching for parallel storylines, and node-based iterative refinement. Our results demonstrate that node-based editing supports control over narrative structure and iterative generation of text, images, audio, and video. We report quantitative outcomes on automatic story outline generation and qualitative observations of editing workflows. Finally, we discuss current limitations such as scalability to longer narratives and consistency across multiple nodes, and outline future work toward human-in-the-loop and user-centered creative AI tools.

We present ReDirector, a novel camera-controlled video retake generation method for dynamically captured variable-length videos. In particular, we rectify a common misuse of RoPE in previous works by aligning the spatiotemporal positions of the input video and the target retake. Moreover, we introduce Rotary Camera Encoding (RoCE), a camera-conditioned RoPE phase shift that captures and integrates multi-view relationships within and across the input and target videos. By integrating camera conditions into RoPE, our method generalizes to out-of-distribution camera trajectories and video lengths, yielding improved dynamic object localization and static background preservation. Extensive experiments further demonstrate significant improvements in camera controllability, geometric consistency, and video quality across various trajectories and lengths.

Shot transitions play a pivotal role in multi-shot video generation, as they determine the overall narrative expression and the directorial design of visual storytelling. However, recent progress has primarily focused on low-level visual consistency across shots, neglecting how transitions are designed and how cinematographic language contributes to coherent narrative expression. This often leads to mere sequential shot changes without intentional film-editing patterns. To address this limitation, we propose ShotDirector, an efficient framework that integrates parameter-level camera control and hierarchical editing-pattern-aware prompting. Specifically, we adopt a camera control module that incorporates 6-DoF poses and intrinsic settings to enable precise camera information injection. In addition, a shot-aware mask mechanism is employed to introduce hierarchical prompts aware of professional editing patterns, allowing fine-grained control over shot content. Through this design, our framework effectively combines parameter-level conditions with high-level semantic guidance, achieving film-like controllable shot transitions. To facilitate training and evaluation, we construct ShotWeaver40K, a dataset that captures the priors of film-like editing patterns, and develop a set of evaluation metrics for controllable multi-shot video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

While video foundation models excel at single-shot generation, real-world cinematic storytelling inherently relies on complex multi-shot sequencing. Further progress is constrained by the absence of datasets that address three core challenges: authentic narrative logic, spatiotemporal text-video alignment conflicts, and the "copy-paste" dilemma prevalent in Subject-to-Video (S2V) generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce MuSS, a large-scale, dual-track dataset tailored for multi-shot video and S2V generation. Sourced from over 3,000 movies, MuSS explicitly supports both complex montage transitions and subject-centric narratives. To construct this dataset, we pioneer a progressive captioning pipeline that eliminates contextual conflicts by ensuring local shot-level accuracy before enforcing global narrative coherence. Crucially, we implement a cross-shot matching mechanism to fundamentally eradicate the S2V copy-paste shortcut. Alongside the dataset, we propose the Cinematic Narrative Benchmark, featuring a visual-logic-driven paradigm and a novel Anti-Copy-Paste Variance (ACP-Var) metric to rigorously assess continuous storytelling and 3D structural consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while current baselines struggle with continuous narrative logic or degenerate into trivial 2D sticker generators, our MuSS-augmented model achieves state-of-the-art narrative effectiveness and cross-shot identity preservation.

While Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) and its variants are widely adopted for their long-context capabilities, the extension of the 1D RoPE to video, with its complex spatio-temporal structure, remains an open challenge. This work first introduces a comprehensive analysis that identifies four key characteristics essential for the effective adaptation of RoPE to video, which have not been fully considered in prior work. As part of our analysis, we introduce a challenging V-NIAH-D (Visual Needle-In-A-Haystack with Distractors) task, which adds periodic distractors into V-NIAH. The V-NIAH-D task demonstrates that previous RoPE variants, lacking appropriate temporal dimension allocation, are easily misled by distractors. Based on our analysis, we introduce VideoRoPE, with a 3D structure designed to preserve spatio-temporal relationships. VideoRoPE features low-frequency temporal allocation to mitigate periodic oscillations, a diagonal layout to maintain spatial symmetry, and adjustable temporal spacing to decouple temporal and spatial indexing. VideoRoPE consistently surpasses previous RoPE variants, across diverse downstream tasks such as long video retrieval, video understanding, and video hallucination. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Wiselnn570/VideoRoPE{https://github.com/Wiselnn570/VideoRoPE}.

Text-to-video models have made significant strides in generating short video clips from textual descriptions. Yet, a significant challenge remains: generating several video shots of the same characters, preserving their identity without hurting video quality, dynamics, and responsiveness to text prompts. We present Video Storyboarding, a training-free method to enable pretrained text-to-video models to generate multiple shots with consistent characters, by sharing features between them. Our key insight is that self-attention query features (Q) encode both motion and identity. This creates a hard-to-avoid trade-off between preserving character identity and making videos dynamic, when features are shared. To address this issue, we introduce a novel query injection strategy that balances identity preservation and natural motion retention. This approach improves upon naive consistency techniques applied to videos, which often struggle to maintain this delicate equilibrium. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in character consistency across scenes while maintaining high-quality motion and text alignment. These results offer insights into critical stages of video generation and the interplay of structure and motion in video diffusion models.

Generating videos for visual storytelling can be a tedious and complex process that typically requires either live-action filming or graphics animation rendering. To bypass these challenges, our key idea is to utilize the abundance of existing video clips and synthesize a coherent storytelling video by customizing their appearances. We achieve this by developing a framework comprised of two functional modules: (i) Motion Structure Retrieval, which provides video candidates with desired scene or motion context described by query texts, and (ii) Structure-Guided Text-to-Video Synthesis, which generates plot-aligned videos under the guidance of motion structure and text prompts. For the first module, we leverage an off-the-shelf video retrieval system and extract video depths as motion structure. For the second module, we propose a controllable video generation model that offers flexible controls over structure and characters. The videos are synthesized by following the structural guidance and appearance instruction. To ensure visual consistency across clips, we propose an effective concept personalization approach, which allows the specification of the desired character identities through text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach exhibits significant advantages over various existing baselines.

This paper introduces StoryAnchors, a unified framework for generating high-quality, multi-scene story frames with strong temporal consistency. The framework employs a bidirectional story generator that integrates both past and future contexts to ensure temporal consistency, character continuity, and smooth scene transitions throughout the narrative. Specific conditions are introduced to distinguish story frame generation from standard video synthesis, facilitating greater scene diversity and enhancing narrative richness. To further improve generation quality, StoryAnchors integrates Multi-Event Story Frame Labeling and Progressive Story Frame Training, enabling the model to capture both overarching narrative flow and event-level dynamics. This approach supports the creation of editable and expandable story frames, allowing for manual modifications and the generation of longer, more complex sequences. Extensive experiments show that StoryAnchors outperforms existing open-source models in key areas such as consistency, narrative coherence, and scene diversity. Its performance in narrative consistency and story richness is also on par with GPT-4o. Ultimately, StoryAnchors pushes the boundaries of story-driven frame generation, offering a scalable, flexible, and highly editable foundation for future research.

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have unified a vast range of language tasks, inspiring preliminary efforts in autoregressive video generation. Existing autoregressive video generators either diverge from standard LLM architectures, depend on bulky external text encoders, or incur prohibitive latency due to next-token decoding. In this paper, we introduce Lumos-1, an autoregressive video generator that retains the LLM architecture with minimal architectural modifications. To inject spatiotemporal correlations in LLMs, we identify the efficacy of incorporating 3D RoPE and diagnose its imbalanced frequency spectrum ranges. Therefore, we propose MM-RoPE, a RoPE scheme that preserves the original textual RoPE while providing comprehensive frequency spectra and scaled 3D positions for modeling multimodal spatiotemporal data. Moreover, Lumos-1 resorts to a token dependency strategy that obeys intra-frame bidirectionality and inter-frame temporal causality. Based on this dependency strategy, we identify the issue of frame-wise loss imbalance caused by spatial information redundancy and solve it by proposing Autoregressive Discrete Diffusion Forcing (AR-DF). AR-DF introduces temporal tube masking during training with a compatible inference-time masking policy to avoid quality degradation. By using memory-efficient training techniques, we pre-train Lumos-1 on only 48 GPUs, achieving performance comparable to EMU3 on GenEval, COSMOS-Video2World on VBench-I2V, and OpenSoraPlan on VBench-T2V. Code and models are available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/Lumos.

We present "Narrative Weaver", a novel framework that addresses a fundamental challenge in generative AI: achieving multi-modal controllable, long-range, and consistent visual content generation. While existing models excel at generating high-fidelity short-form visual content, they struggle to maintain narrative coherence and visual consistency across extended sequences - a critical limitation for real-world applications such as filmmaking and e-commerce advertising. Narrative Weaver introduces the first holistic solution that seamlessly integrates three essential capabilities: fine-grained control, automatic narrative planning, and long-range coherence. Our architecture combines a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for high-level narrative planning with a novel fine-grained control module featuring a dynamic Memory Bank that prevents visual drift. To enable practical deployment, we develop a progressive, multi-stage training strategy that efficiently leverages existing pre-trained models, achieving state-of-the-art performance even with limited training data. Recognizing the absence of suitable evaluation benchmarks, we construct and release the E-commerce Advertising Video Storyboard Dataset (EAVSD) - the first comprehensive dataset for this task, containing over 330K high-quality images with rich narrative annotations. Through extensive experiments across three distinct scenarios (controllable multi-scene generation, autonomous storytelling, and e-commerce advertising), we demonstrate our method's superiority while opening new possibilities for AI-driven content creation.

We present Flex4DHuman, a multi-view video diffusion model that transforms a monocular or sparse multi-view video of a dynamic subject into synchronized dense multi-view videos using only relative camera-pose conditioning. Unlike prior human-centric methods that rely on skeletons, depth maps, normals, or rendered target-view geometry, Flex4DHuman requires no explicit geometry priors and instead conditions generation through relative camera-pose positional encoding. The generated videos can be directly ingested by downstream reconstruction pipelines to create dynamic 4D Gaussian splats. Built on the Wan 2.1 1.3B text-to-video model, Flex4DHuman preserves the backbone architecture and encodes camera and view information through a five-axis positional encoding that extends spatio-temporal RoPE with view indices and continuous SE(3) relative camera geometry. A three-stage curriculum progressively trains the model for pose following, flexible reference-to-target view generation, and temporal rollout. To support temporal rollout, we train with clean historical target-view tokens. We also add multi-view captions to enable test-time text control. Combined with an off-the-shelf 4D Gaussian Splatting stage, our framework lifts monocular static-camera videos into dynamic 4D Gaussian splats. Experiments on DNA-Rendering and ActorsHQ show that Flex4DHuman surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods, while the same formulation generalizes to animal categories after mixed human-animal training. These capabilities make Flex4DHuman a practical step toward scalable 4D content creation from casual monocular videos for simulation, gaming, AR/VR, and video re-shooting.

The narrative quality of a video fundamentally determines its perceptual value. Although existing video generation methods can produce visually appealing content, they predominantly rely on sparse conditioning signals such as text prompts or first/last frames, which limits precise control over narrative structure and temporal pacing. In this paper, we propose SmartDirector, a framework that enhances the narrative capacity of video generation models through multiple keyframes. SmartDirector supports flexible generation scenarios including single-shot generation, multi-shot narrative synthesis, and video extension. The framework operates in two stages: Director-Gen generates a low-resolution video conditioned on the provided keyframes, and Director-SR refines the output by exploiting high-resolution keyframes as semantic anchors to recover fine-grained details. To enable robust multi-keyframe training, we construct a data pipeline that curates single-shot and multi-shot sequences from movies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SmartDirector substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. We will release the code to facilitate further research.

Audio-driven human animation methods, such as talking head and talking body generation, have made remarkable progress in generating synchronized facial movements and appealing visual quality videos. However, existing methods primarily focus on single human animation and struggle with multi-stream audio inputs, facing incorrect binding problems between audio and persons. Additionally, they exhibit limitations in instruction-following capabilities. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel task: Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation, and introduce a new framework, MultiTalk, to address the challenges during multi-person generation. Specifically, for audio injection, we investigate several schemes and propose the Label Rotary Position Embedding (L-RoPE) method to resolve the audio and person binding problem. Furthermore, during training, we observe that partial parameter training and multi-task training are crucial for preserving the instruction-following ability of the base model. MultiTalk achieves superior performance compared to other methods on several datasets, including talking head, talking body, and multi-person datasets, demonstrating the powerful generation capabilities of our approach.

Moral stories are a time-tested vehicle for transmitting values, yet modern NLP lacks a large, structured corpus that couples coherent narratives with explicit ethical lessons. We close this gap with TF1-EN-3M, the first open dataset of three million English-language fables generated exclusively by instruction-tuned models no larger than 8B parameters. Each story follows a six-slot scaffold (character -> trait -> setting -> conflict -> resolution -> moral), produced through a combinatorial prompt engine that guarantees genre fidelity while covering a broad thematic space. A hybrid evaluation pipeline blends (i) a GPT-based critic that scores grammar, creativity, moral clarity, and template adherence with (ii) reference-free diversity and readability metrics. Among ten open-weight candidates, an 8B-parameter Llama-3 variant delivers the best quality-speed trade-off, producing high-scoring fables on a single consumer GPU (<24 GB VRAM) at approximately 13.5 cents per 1,000 fables. We release the dataset, generation code, evaluation scripts, and full metadata under a permissive license, enabling exact reproducibility and cost benchmarking. TF1-EN-3M opens avenues for research in instruction following, narrative intelligence, value alignment, and child-friendly educational AI, demonstrating that large-scale moral storytelling no longer requires proprietary giant models.

With the remarkable advancements in image generation and open-form text generation, the creation of interleaved image-text content has become an increasingly intriguing field. Multimodal story generation, characterized by producing narrative texts and vivid images in an interleaved manner, has emerged as a valuable and practical task with broad applications. However, this task poses significant challenges, as it necessitates the comprehension of the complex interplay between texts and images, and the ability to generate long sequences of coherent, contextually relevant texts and visuals. In this work, we propose SEED-Story, a novel method that leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to generate extended multimodal stories. Our model, built upon the powerful comprehension capability of MLLM, predicts text tokens as well as visual tokens, which are subsequently processed with an adapted visual de-tokenizer to produce images with consistent characters and styles. We further propose multimodal attention sink mechanism to enable the generation of stories with up to 25 sequences (only 10 for training) in a highly efficient autoregressive manner. Additionally, we present a large-scale and high-resolution dataset named StoryStream for training our model and quantitatively evaluating the task of multimodal story generation in various aspects.

Existing approaches for digital short-drama production typically rely on one-shot LLM generated scripts and loosely coupled pipelines, which fail to satisfy three key requirements of short-drama generation: (1) narrative pacing, resulting in weak hooks, insufficient escalation, and unattractive endings; (2) spatial consistency, leading to drifting scene layouts and inconsistent character positions across clips; and (3) production-level quality control, requiring extensive manual review and correction across script and visual stages. We present One Sentence, One Drama, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that transforms a user's single-sentence idea into a fully produced short drama through structured intermediate modules and iterative refinement. Our approach is built upon three key components: (1) a multi-agent debate-based story generation module that enforces short-drama pacing and narrative coherence; (2) a 3D-grounded first-frame generation mechanism that establishes a shared spatial reference for consistent character positioning and scene layout across clips; and (3) multi-stage reviewer loops that perform comprehensive error detection and targeted revision across script, visual, and video generation stages. We also introduce scene-level BGM matching and scene transition planning to improve the audience's immersive experience. To systematically evaluate this task, we introduce Short-Drama-Bench, a benchmark that extends standard video quality metrics with short-drama-specific criteria. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing pipelines in narrative quality, cross-clip consistency, and overall viewing experience.

The creation of cinematic-quality animal effects necessitates the precise modeling of muscle and fur dynamics, a process that remains both labor-intensive and computationally expensive within traditional production workflows. While generative diffusion models have shown promise in diverse artistic workflows, their capacity for high-fidelity animal simulation remains largely unexploited. We present MoZoo, a generative dynamics solver that bypasses conventional refinement to synthesize high-fidelity animal videos from coarse meshes under multimodal guidance. We propose Role-Aware RoPE (RAR-RoPE) which employs role-based index remapping to synchronize motion alignment while decoupling reference information via fixed temporal offsets. Complementing this, Asymmetric Decoupled Attention partitions the latent sequence to enforce a unidirectional information flow, effectively preventing feature interference and improving computational efficiency. To address the scarcity of high-quality training data, we introduce MoZoo-Data, a synthetic-to-real pipeline that leverages a rendering engine and an inverse mapping approach to construct a large-scale dataset of paired sequences. Furthermore, we establish MoZooBench, a comprehensive benchmark with 120 mesh-video pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that MoZoo achieves high-fidelity fur simulation across diverse animal skeletons and layouts, preserving superior temporal and structural consistency.

Multimodal position encoding is essential for vision-language models, yet there has been little systematic investigation into multimodal position encoding. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of multimodal Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) by examining its two core components: position design and frequency allocation. Through extensive experiments, we identify three key guidelines: positional coherence, full frequency utilization, and preservation of textual priors-ensuring unambiguous layout, rich representation, and faithful transfer from the pre-trained LLM. Based on these insights, we propose Multi-Head RoPE (MHRoPE) and MRoPE-Interleave (MRoPE-I), two simple and plug-and-play variants that require no architectural changes. Our methods consistently outperform existing approaches across diverse benchmarks, with significant improvements in both general and fine-grained multimodal understanding. Code will be avaliable at https://github.com/JJJYmmm/Multimodal-RoPEs.

Effective multi-shot generation demands purposeful, film-like transitions and strict cinematic continuity. Current methods, however, often prioritize basic visual consistency, neglecting crucial editing patterns (e.g., shot/reverse shot, cutaways) that drive narrative flow for compelling storytelling. This yields outputs that may be visually coherent but lack narrative sophistication and true cinematic integrity. To bridge this, we introduce Next Shot Generation (NSG): synthesizing a subsequent, high-quality shot that critically conforms to professional editing patterns while upholding rigorous cinematic continuity. Our framework, Cut2Next, leverages a Diffusion Transformer (DiT). It employs in-context tuning guided by a novel Hierarchical Multi-Prompting strategy. This strategy uses Relational Prompts to define overall context and inter-shot editing styles. Individual Prompts then specify per-shot content and cinematographic attributes. Together, these guide Cut2Next to generate cinematically appropriate next shots. Architectural innovations, Context-Aware Condition Injection (CACI) and Hierarchical Attention Mask (HAM), further integrate these diverse signals without introducing new parameters. We construct RawCuts (large-scale) and CuratedCuts (refined) datasets, both with hierarchical prompts, and introduce CutBench for evaluation. Experiments show Cut2Next excels in visual consistency and text fidelity. Crucially, user studies reveal a strong preference for Cut2Next, particularly for its adherence to intended editing patterns and overall cinematic continuity, validating its ability to generate high-quality, narratively expressive, and cinematically coherent subsequent shots.

Despite rapid advancements in video generation models, generating coherent storytelling videos that span multiple scenes and characters remains challenging. Current methods often rigidly convert pre-generated keyframes into fixed-length clips, resulting in disjointed narratives and pacing issues. Furthermore, the inherent instability of video generation models means that even a single low-quality clip can significantly degrade the entire output animation's logical coherence and visual continuity. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce AniMaker, a multi-agent framework enabling efficient multi-candidate clip generation and storytelling-aware clip selection, thus creating globally consistent and story-coherent animation solely from text input. The framework is structured around specialized agents, including the Director Agent for storyboard generation, the Photography Agent for video clip generation, the Reviewer Agent for evaluation, and the Post-Production Agent for editing and voiceover. Central to AniMaker's approach are two key technical components: MCTS-Gen in Photography Agent, an efficient Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-inspired strategy that intelligently navigates the candidate space to generate high-potential clips while optimizing resource usage; and AniEval in Reviewer Agent, the first framework specifically designed for multi-shot animation evaluation, which assesses critical aspects such as story-level consistency, action completion, and animation-specific features by considering each clip in the context of its preceding and succeeding clips. Experiments demonstrate that AniMaker achieves superior quality as measured by popular metrics including VBench and our proposed AniEval framework, while significantly improving the efficiency of multi-candidate generation, pushing AI-generated storytelling animation closer to production standards.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) has accelerated AI-native applications, such as AI-based storybooks that automate engaging story production for children. However, challenges remain in improving story attractiveness, enriching storytelling expressiveness, and developing open-source evaluation benchmarks and frameworks. Therefore, we propose and opensource MM-StoryAgent, which creates immersive narrated video storybooks with refined plots, role-consistent images, and multi-channel audio. MM-StoryAgent designs a multi-agent framework that employs LLMs and diverse expert tools (generative models and APIs) across several modalities to produce expressive storytelling videos. The framework enhances story attractiveness through a multi-stage writing pipeline. In addition, it improves the immersive storytelling experience by integrating sound effects with visual, music and narrative assets. MM-StoryAgent offers a flexible, open-source platform for further development, where generative modules can be substituted. Both objective and subjective evaluation regarding textual story quality and alignment between modalities validate the effectiveness of our proposed MM-StoryAgent system. The demo and source code are available.

Storytelling video generation (SVG) has recently emerged as a task to create long, multi-motion, multi-scene videos that consistently represent the story described in the input text script. SVG holds great potential for diverse content creation in media and entertainment; however, it also presents significant challenges: (1) objects must exhibit a range of fine-grained, complex motions, (2) multiple objects need to appear consistently across scenes, and (3) subjects may require multiple motions with seamless transitions within a single scene. To address these challenges, we propose DreamRunner, a novel story-to-video generation method: First, we structure the input script using a large language model (LLM) to facilitate both coarse-grained scene planning as well as fine-grained object-level layout and motion planning. Next, DreamRunner presents retrieval-augmented test-time adaptation to capture target motion priors for objects in each scene, supporting diverse motion customization based on retrieved videos, thus facilitating the generation of new videos with complex, scripted motions. Lastly, we propose a novel spatial-temporal region-based 3D attention and prior injection module SR3AI for fine-grained object-motion binding and frame-by-frame semantic control. We compare DreamRunner with various SVG baselines, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in character consistency, text alignment, and smooth transitions. Additionally, DreamRunner exhibits strong fine-grained condition-following ability in compositional text-to-video generation, significantly outperforming baselines on T2V-ComBench. Finally, we validate DreamRunner's robust ability to generate multi-object interactions with qualitative examples.

Developing unified video generation and editing models capable of interpreting interleaved multimodal inputs is a promising yet challenging frontier field. Existing unified frameworks predominantly rely on massive models (typically 13B parameters or more) and incorporate source video conditions for editing by concatenating sequence tokens. This concatenation inevitably doubles the sequence length, quadrupling the computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism and introducing prohibitive overhead. To address these bottlenecks, we present LoomVideo, a highly efficient 5B-parameter unified architecture for both video generation and editing. LoomVideo replaces the standard text encoder with a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) and employs Deepstack injection mechanism to align multi-layer MLLM features with the Diffusion Transformer (DiT). Crucially, we introduce a zero-overhead Scale-and-Add conditioning approach for video editing. By scaling and directly adding the clean source video latent to the noised target latent, this elegant design eliminates the need for token concatenation, drastically reducing computational cost while maintaining robust capabilities for complex, non-rigid edits. Furthermore, a Negative Temporal RoPE strategy is seamlessly integrated to handle multiple reference images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our compact 5B model achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across comprehensive benchmarks, exhibiting exceptional superiority in e-commerce and fashion generation scenarios. Benefiting from the zero-overhead conditioning mechanism, LoomVideo achieves at least a 5.41x acceleration in inference speed compared to models of similar capabilities, paving the way for highly practical and efficient video foundation models.

Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) is a key component of context scaling in Large Language Models (LLMs). While various methods have been proposed to adapt RoPE to longer contexts, their guiding principles generally fall into two categories: (1) out-of-distribution (OOD) mitigation, which scales RoPE frequencies to accommodate unseen positions, and (2) Semantic Modeling, which posits that the attention scores computed with RoPE should always prioritize semantically similar tokens. In this work, we unify these seemingly distinct objectives through a minimalist intervention, namely CoPE: soft clipping lowfrequency components of RoPE. CoPE not only eliminates OOD outliers and refines semantic signals, but also prevents spectral leakage caused by hard clipping. Extensive experiments demonstrate that simply applying our soft clipping strategy to RoPE yields significant performance gains that scale up to 256k context length, validating our theoretical analysis and establishing CoPE as a new state-of-the-art for length generalization. Our code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/hrlics/CoPE.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made significant progress in multimodal tasks. However, their performance often deteriorates in long-context scenarios, particularly long videos. While Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) has been widely adopted for length generalization in Large Language Models (LLMs), extending vanilla RoPE to capture the intricate spatial-temporal dependencies in videos remains an unsolved challenge. Existing methods typically allocate different frequencies within RoPE to encode 3D positional information. However, these allocation strategies mainly rely on heuristics, lacking in-depth theoretical analysis. In this paper, we first study how different allocation strategies impact the long-context capabilities of VLMs. Our analysis reveals that current multimodal RoPEs fail to reliably capture semantic similarities over extended contexts. To address this issue, we propose HoPE, a Hybrid of Position Embedding designed to improve the long-context capabilities of VLMs. HoPE introduces a hybrid frequency allocation strategy for reliable semantic modeling over arbitrarily long context, and a dynamic temporal scaling mechanism to facilitate robust learning and flexible inference across diverse context lengths. Extensive experiments across four video benchmarks on long video understanding and retrieval tasks demonstrate that HoPE consistently outperforms existing methods, confirming its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/hrlics/HoPE.

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

Conditional story generation is significant in human-machine interaction, particularly in producing stories with complex plots. While Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multiple NLP tasks, including story generation, it is challenging to generate stories with both complex and creative plots. Existing methods often rely on detailed prompts to guide LLMs to meet target conditions, which inadvertently restrict the creative potential of the generated stories. We argue that leveraging information from exemplary human-written stories facilitates generating more diverse plotlines. Delving deeper into story details helps build complex and credible plots. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-auGmented stoRy generation framework with a fOrest of eVidEnce (GROVE) to enhance stories' complexity. We build a retrieval repository for target conditions to produce few-shot examples to prompt LLMs. Additionally, we design an ``asking-why'' prompting scheme that extracts a forest of evidence, providing compensation for the ambiguities that may occur in the generated story. This iterative process uncovers underlying story backgrounds. Finally, we select the most fitting chains of evidence from the evidence forest and integrate them into the generated story, thereby enhancing the narrative's complexity and credibility. Experimental results and numerous examples verify the effectiveness of our method.

Generating a coherent multi-shot video requires structured cross-shot memory. Subject appearance, scene context, and speaker identity must persist across cuts. Existing approaches either train end-to-end over fixed-length sequences and cannot scale, generate shot-by-shot with memory banks that grow linearly, or orchestrate pretrained generators under an LLM planner without a multi-shot-aware backbone. We present UnityShots, a memory-driven multi-shot audio-video generation system built on LTX-2.3, trained on annotated cinematic and music-video shots. The video stream maintains two fixed-size slots, a long-term memory (LTM) slot anchored to the opening shot and a short-term memory (STM) slot holding the immediately preceding tail, both updated at every cut by a boundary-conditioned gate that fuses visual cut probability and beat-tracker signals. The audio stream injects a reference speaker token at every shot to preserve vocal timbre without a sliding audio bank. A discrete cut-type prior, learned through AdaLN, becomes an inference-time control knob over transition strength. We release a benchmark of 200 multi-cultural multi-shot sequences spanning six ethnic regions and ten or more languages, with per-shot reference identities, reference audio, and per-boundary transition labels. Evaluated across I2V, T2V, and R2V conditioning modes, UnityShots leads open-source baselines on every cross-shot coherence metric and matches the strongest closed-source system on the multi-shot axes.

Maintaining consistent characters, props, and environments across multiple shots is a central challenge in narrative video generation. Existing models can produce high-quality short clips but often fail to preserve entity identity and appearance when scenes change or when entities reappear after long temporal gaps. We present VideoMemory, an entity-centric framework that integrates narrative planning with visual generation through a Dynamic Memory Bank. Given a structured script, a multi-agent system decomposes the narrative into shots, retrieves entity representations from memory, and synthesizes keyframes and videos conditioned on these retrieved states. The Dynamic Memory Bank stores explicit visual and semantic descriptors for characters, props, and backgrounds, and is updated after each shot to reflect story-driven changes while preserving identity. This retrieval-update mechanism enables consistent portrayal of entities across distant shots and supports coherent long-form generation. To evaluate this setting, we construct a 54-case multi-shot consistency benchmark covering character-, prop-, and background-persistent scenarios. Extensive experiments show that VideoMemory achieves strong entity-level coherence and high perceptual quality across diverse narrative sequences.

Interactive storytelling benefits from planning and exploring multiple 'what if' scenarios. Modern LLMs are useful tools for ideation and exploration, but current chat-based user interfaces restrict users to a single linear flow. To address this limitation, we propose Narrative Studio -- a novel in-browser narrative exploration environment featuring a tree-like interface that allows branching exploration from user-defined points in a story. Each branch is extended via iterative LLM inference guided by system and user-defined prompts. Additionally, we employ Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to automatically expand promising narrative paths based on user-specified criteria, enabling more diverse and robust story development. We also allow users to enhance narrative coherence by grounding the generated text in an entity graph that represents the actors and environment of the story.

Multi-shot video generation extends single-shot generation to coherent visual narratives, yet maintaining consistent characters, objects, and locations across shots remains a challenge over long sequences. Existing evaluations typically use independently generated prompt sets with limited entity coverage and simple consistency metrics, making standardized comparison difficult. We introduce EntityBench, a benchmark of 140 episodes (2,491 shots) derived from real narrative media, with explicit per-shot entity schedules tracking characters, objects, and locations simultaneously across easy / medium / hard tiers of up to 50 shots, 13 cross-shot characters, 8 cross-shot locations, 22 cross-shot objects, and recurrence gaps spanning up to 48 shots. It is paired with a three-pillar evaluation suite that disentangles intra-shot quality, prompt-following alignment, and cross-shot consistency, with a fidelity gate that admits only accurate entity appearances into cross-shot scoring. As a baseline, we propose EntityMem, a memory-augmented generation system that stores verified per-entity visual references in a persistent memory bank before generation begins. Experiments show that cross-shot entity consistency degrades sharply with recurrence distance in existing methods, and that explicit per-entity memory yields the highest character fidelity (Cohen's d = +2.33) and presence among methods evaluated. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Catherine-R-He/EntityBench/.

Cinematic video depicts multiple subjects acting or interacting at specific moments, captured with deliberate camera movement, and stitched together by shot transitions. Together, these elements demand a level of fine-grained control beyond current text-to-video models. Existing work addresses each axis in isolation: multi-subject personalization, temporal control, multi-shot synthesis, or camera control; no prior framework jointly integrates all four. We present CineOrchestra, a unified video diffusion model that controls subjects, events, cameras, and shot transitions simultaneously. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous cinematic elements share a fundamental structure: each is an entity acting over a specific temporal interval, which can therefore all be expressed through one shared structure of entity-centric conditioning primitives, augmented with reference images for visual entities. This formulation reduces the architectural challenge to a single positional encoding problem, which we solve with two parameter-free coordinated rotary embeddings: (a) an interval-sampled temporal RoPE that yields consistent attention behavior across events of dramatically varying duration, and (b) a 2D entity-temporal cross-attention RoPE that disambiguates per-entity conditions and routes each to its corresponding spatiotemporal region. On two new benchmarks, CineOrchestra outperforms six per-axis specialists on dense caption following and shot-transition timing, with consistent gains in a pairwise user study and component ablations.

Recent advances in Video Foundation Models (VFMs) have revolutionized human-centric video synthesis, yet fine-grained and independent editing of subjects and scenes remains a critical challenge. Recent attempts to incorporate richer environment control through rigid 3D geometric compositions often encounter a stark trade-off between precise control and generative flexibility. Furthermore, the heavy 3D pre-processing still limits practical scalability. In this paper, we propose ONE-SHOT, a parameter-efficient framework for compositional human-environment video generation. Our key insight is to factorize the generative process into disentangled signals. Specifically, we introduce a canonical-space injection mechanism that decouples human dynamics from environmental cues via cross-attention. We also propose Dynamic-Grounded-RoPE, a novel positional embedding strategy that establishes spatial correspondences between disparate spatial domains without any heuristic 3D alignments. To support long-horizon synthesis, we introduce a Hybrid Context Integration mechanism to maintain subject and scene consistency across minute-level generations. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, offering superior structural control and creative diversity for video synthesis. Our project has been available on: https://martayang.github.io/ONE-SHOT/.

We propose Camera Artist, a multi-agent framework that models a real-world filmmaking workflow to generate narrative videos with explicit cinematic language. While recent multi-agent systems have made substantial progress in automating filmmaking workflows from scripts to videos, they often lack explicit mechanisms to structure narrative progression across adjacent shots and deliberate use of cinematic language, resulting in fragmented storytelling and limited filmic quality. To address this, Camera Artist builds upon established agentic pipelines and introduces a dedicated Cinematography Shot Agent, which integrates recursive storyboard generation to strengthen shot-to-shot narrative continuity and cinematic language injection to produce more expressive, film-oriented shot designs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines in narrative consistency, dynamic expressiveness, and perceived film quality.

The evolution of video generation toward complex, multi-shot narratives has exposed a critical deficit in current evaluation methods. Existing benchmarks remain anchored to single-shot paradigms, lacking the comprehensive story assets and cross-shot metrics required to assess long-form coherence and appeal. To bridge this gap, we introduce MSVBench, the first comprehensive benchmark featuring hierarchical scripts and reference images tailored for Multi-Shot Video generation. We propose a hybrid evaluation framework that synergizes the high-level semantic reasoning of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with the fine-grained perceptual rigor of domain-specific expert models. Evaluating 20 video generation methods across diverse paradigms, we find that current models--despite strong visual fidelity--primarily behave as visual interpolators rather than true world models. We further validate the reliability of our benchmark by demonstrating a state-of-the-art Spearman's rank correlation of 94.4% with human judgments. Finally, MSVBench extends beyond evaluation by providing a scalable supervisory signal. Fine-tuning a lightweight model on its pipeline-refined reasoning traces yields human-aligned performance comparable to commercial models like Gemini-2.5-Flash.

Automated movie creation requires coordinating multiple characters, modalities, and narrative elements across extended sequences -- a challenge that existing end-to-end approaches struggle to address effectively. We present CineAGI, a hierarchical movie generation framework that decomposes this complex task through specialized multi-agent orchestration. Our framework employs three key innovations: (1) a multi-agent narrative synthesis module where specialized LLM agents collaboratively generate comprehensive cinematic blueprints with character profiles, scene descriptions, and cross-modal specifications; (2) a decoupled character-centric pipeline that maintains identity consistency through instance-level tracking and integration while enabling flexible multi-character composition; and (3) a hierarchical audio-visual synchronization mechanism ensuring frame-level alignment of dialogue, expressions, and music. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CineAGI achieves 40\% improvement in overall consistency, 4.4\% gain in subject consistency, 5.4\% enhancement in aesthetic quality, and 28.7\% higher character consistency compared to baselines. Our work establishes a principled foundation for automated multi-scene video generation that preserves narrative coherence and character authenticity.

Long-form video generation requires systematic narrative planning and visual consistency that current short-clip methods cannot provide. Existing methods generate isolated sequences without narrative structure and lack mechanisms for maintaining character and environmental consistency across scenes. We present ViMax, an agentic video generation framework that addresses video creation through coordinated multi-agent collaboration where specialized components negotiate narrative decisions, visual continuity, and production quality. Our framework employs a hierarchical narrative engine with retrieval-augmented generation for global story coherence and a dependency-aware visual consistency mechanism that tracks character and environmental states across temporal boundaries, while VLM-guided agents continuously monitor and refine both narrative coherence and visual fidelity. The framework enables coordinated agent collaboration to generate extended narrative content. This maintains both storytelling integrity and visual coherence across multi-scene timelines.

Storyboarding is a core skill in visual storytelling for film, animation, and games. However, automating this process requires a system to achieve two properties that current approaches rarely satisfy simultaneously: inter-shot consistency and explicit editability. While 2D diffusion-based generators produce vivid imagery, they often suffer from identity drift along with limited geometric control; conversely, traditional 3D animation workflows are consistent and editable but require expert-heavy, labor-intensive authoring. We present StoryBlender, a grounded 3D storyboard generation framework governed by a Story-centric Reflection Scheme. At its core, we propose the StoryBlender system, which is built on a three-stage pipeline: (1) Semantic-Spatial Grounding, to construct a continuity memory graph to decouple global assets from shot-specific variables for long-horizon consistency; (2) Canonical Asset Materialization, to instantiate entities in a unified coordinate space to maintain visual identity; and (3) Spatial-Temporal Dynamics, to achieve layout design and cinematic evolution through visual metrics. By orchestrating multiple agents in a hierarchical manner within a verification loop, StoryBlender iteratively self-corrects spatial hallucinations via engine-verified feedback. The resulting native 3D scenes support direct, precise editing of cameras and visual assets while preserving unwavering multi-shot continuity. Experiments demonstrate that StoryBlender significantly improves consistency and editability over both diffusion-based and 3D-grounded baselines. Code, data, and demonstration video will be available on https://engineeringai-lab.github.io/StoryBlender/

In this paper, we introduce NarrativePlay, a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives such as novels in an immersive environment. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate human-like responses, guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. The system incorporates auto-generated visual display of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing user experience. Our approach eschews predefined sandboxes, focusing instead on main storyline events extracted from narratives from the perspective of a user-selected character. NarrativePlay has been evaluated on two types of narratives, detective and adventure stories, where users can either explore the world or improve their favorability with the narrative characters through conversations.

A short clip of video may contain progression of multiple events and an interesting story line. A human need to capture both the event in every shot and associate them together to understand the story behind it. In this work, we present a new multi-shot video understanding benchmark Shot2Story20K with detailed shot-level captions and comprehensive video summaries. To facilitate better semantic understanding of videos, we provide captions for both visual signals and human narrations. We design several distinct tasks including single-shot video and narration captioning, multi-shot video summarization, and video retrieval with shot descriptions. Preliminary experiments show some challenges to generate a long and comprehensive video summary. Nevertheless, the generated imperfect summaries can already significantly boost the performance of existing video understanding tasks such as video question-answering, promoting an under-explored setting of video understanding with detailed summaries.

Current diffusion-based text-to-video methods are limited to producing short video clips of a single shot and lack the capability to generate multi-shot videos with discrete transitions where the same character performs distinct activities across the same or different backgrounds. To address this limitation we propose a framework that includes a dataset collection pipeline and architectural extensions to video diffusion models to enable text-to-multi-shot video generation. Our approach enables generation of multi-shot videos as a single video with full attention across all frames of all shots, ensuring character and background consistency, and allows users to control the number, duration, and content of shots through shot-specific conditioning. This is achieved by incorporating a transition token into the text-to-video model to control at which frames a new shot begins and a local attention masking strategy which controls the transition token's effect and allows shot-specific prompting. To obtain training data we propose a novel data collection pipeline to construct a multi-shot video dataset from existing single-shot video datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning a pre-trained text-to-video model for a few thousand iterations is enough for the model to subsequently be able to generate multi-shot videos with shot-specific control, outperforming the baselines. You can find more details in https://shotadapter.github.io/

State-of-the-art text-to-video models excel at generating isolated clips but fall short of creating the coherent, multi-shot narratives, which are the essence of storytelling. We bridge this "narrative gap" with HoloCine, a model that generates entire scenes holistically to ensure global consistency from the first shot to the last. Our architecture achieves precise directorial control through a Window Cross-Attention mechanism that localizes text prompts to specific shots, while a Sparse Inter-Shot Self-Attention pattern (dense within shots but sparse between them) ensures the efficiency required for minute-scale generation. Beyond setting a new state-of-the-art in narrative coherence, HoloCine develops remarkable emergent abilities: a persistent memory for characters and scenes, and an intuitive grasp of cinematic techniques. Our work marks a pivotal shift from clip synthesis towards automated filmmaking, making end-to-end cinematic creation a tangible future. Our code is available at: https://holo-cine.github.io/.

Multimedia content, such as advertisements and story videos, exhibit a rich blend of creativity and multiple modalities. They incorporate elements like text, visuals, audio, and storytelling techniques, employing devices like emotions, symbolism, and slogans to convey meaning. While previous research in multimedia understanding has focused mainly on videos with specific actions like cooking, there is a dearth of large annotated training datasets, hindering the development of supervised learning models with satisfactory performance for real-world applications. However, the rise of large language models (LLMs) has witnessed remarkable zero-shot performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as emotion classification, question-answering, and topic classification. To bridge this performance gap in multimedia understanding, we propose verbalizing story videos to generate their descriptions in natural language and then performing video-understanding tasks on the generated story as opposed to the original video. Through extensive experiments on five video-understanding tasks, we demonstrate that our method, despite being zero-shot, achieves significantly better results than supervised baselines for video understanding. Further, alleviating a lack of story understanding benchmarks, we publicly release the first dataset on a crucial task in computational social science, persuasion strategy identification.

Existing Subject-to-Video Generation (S2V) methods have achieved high-fidelity and subject-consistent video generation, yet remain constrained to single-view subject references. This limitation renders the S2V task reducible to an S2I + I2V pipeline, failing to exploit the full potential of video subject control. In this work, we propose and address the challenging Multi-View S2V (MV-S2V) task, which synthesizes videos from multiple reference views to enforce 3D-level subject consistency. Regarding the scarcity of training data, we first develop a synthetic data curation pipeline to generate highly customized synthetic data, complemented by a small-scale real-world captured dataset to boost the training of MV-S2V. Another key issue lies in the potential confusion between cross-subject and cross-view references in conditional generation. To overcome this, we further introduce Temporally Shifted RoPE (TS-RoPE) to distinguish between different subjects and distinct views of the same subject in reference conditioning. Our framework achieves superior 3D subject consistency w.r.t. multi-view reference images and high-quality visual outputs, establishing a new meaningful direction for subject-driven video generation. Code and data are available at: https://szy-young.github.io/mv-s2v

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) has shown strong performance in text-based Large Language Models (LLMs), but extending it to video remains a challenge due to the intricate spatiotemporal structure of video frames. Existing adaptations, such as RoPE-3D, attempt to encode spatial and temporal dimensions separately but suffer from two major limitations: positional bias in attention distribution and disruptions in video-text transitions. To overcome these issues, we propose Video Rotary Position Embedding (VRoPE), a novel positional encoding method tailored for Video-LLMs. Our approach restructures positional indices to preserve spatial coherence and ensure a smooth transition between video and text tokens. Additionally, we introduce a more balanced encoding strategy that mitigates attention biases, ensuring a more uniform distribution of spatial focus. Extensive experiments on Vicuna and Qwen2 across different model scales demonstrate that VRoPE consistently outperforms previous RoPE variants, achieving significant improvements in video understanding, temporal reasoning, and retrieval tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/johncaged/VRoPE

Recent advancements in video diffusion models have shown exceptional abilities in simulating real-world dynamics and maintaining 3D consistency. This progress inspires us to investigate the potential of these models to ensure dynamic consistency across various viewpoints, a highly desirable feature for applications such as virtual filming. Unlike existing methods focused on multi-view generation of single objects for 4D reconstruction, our interest lies in generating open-world videos from arbitrary viewpoints, incorporating 6 DoF camera poses. To achieve this, we propose a plug-and-play module that enhances a pre-trained text-to-video model for multi-camera video generation, ensuring consistent content across different viewpoints. Specifically, we introduce a multi-view synchronization module to maintain appearance and geometry consistency across these viewpoints. Given the scarcity of high-quality training data, we design a hybrid training scheme that leverages multi-camera images and monocular videos to supplement Unreal Engine-rendered multi-camera videos. Furthermore, our method enables intriguing extensions, such as re-rendering a video from novel viewpoints. We also release a multi-view synchronized video dataset, named SynCamVideo-Dataset. Project page: https://jianhongbai.github.io/SynCamMaster/.

The integration of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) in Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) has significantly enhanced text-to-image generation quality. However, the fundamental reliance of self-attention layers on positional embedding versus query-key similarity during generation remains an intriguing question. We present the first mechanistic analysis of RoPE-based MMDiT models (e.g., FLUX), introducing an automated probing strategy that disentangles positional information versus content dependencies by strategically manipulating RoPE during generation. Our analysis reveals distinct dependency patterns that do not straightforwardly correlate with depth, offering new insights into the layer-specific roles in RoPE-based MMDiT. Based on these findings, we propose a training-free, task-specific image editing framework that categorizes editing tasks into three types: position-dependent editing (e.g., object addition), content similarity-dependent editing (e.g., non-rigid editing), and region-preserved editing (e.g., background replacement). For each type, we design tailored key-value injection strategies based on the characteristics of the editing task. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in preserving original semantic content and achieving seamless modifications.

Current work on image-based story generation suffers from the fact that the existing image sequence collections do not have coherent plots behind them. We improve visual story generation by producing a new image-grounded dataset, Visual Writing Prompts (VWP). VWP contains almost 2K selected sequences of movie shots, each including 5-10 images. The image sequences are aligned with a total of 12K stories which were collected via crowdsourcing given the image sequences and a set of grounded characters from the corresponding image sequence. Our new image sequence collection and filtering process has allowed us to obtain stories that are more coherent and have more narrativity compared to previous work. We also propose a character-based story generation model driven by coherence as a strong baseline. Evaluations show that our generated stories are more coherent, visually grounded, and have more narrativity than stories generated with the current state-of-the-art model.

Storyboard synthesis plays a crucial role in visual storytelling, aiming to generate coherent shot sequences that visually narrate cinematic events with consistent characters, scenes, and transitions. However, existing approaches are mostly adapted from text-to-image diffusion models, which struggle to maintain long-range temporal coherence, consistent character identities, and narrative flow across multiple shots. In this paper, we introduce DreamShot, a video generative model based storyboard framework that fully exploits powerful video diffusion priors for controllable multi-shot synthesis. DreamShot supports both Text-to-Shot and Reference-to-Shot generation, as well as story continuation conditioned on previous frames, enabling flexible and context-aware storyboard generation. By leveraging the spatial-temporal consistency inherent in video generative models, DreamShot produces visually and semantically coherent sequences with improved narrative fidelity and character continuity. Furthermore, DreamShot incorporates a multi-reference role conditioning module that accepts multiple character reference images and enforces identity alignment via a Role-Attention Consistency Loss, explicitly constraining attention between reference and generated roles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamShot achieves superior scene coherence, role consistency, and generation efficiency compared to state-of-the-art text-to-image storyboard models, establishing a new direction toward controllable video model-driven visual storytelling.

Recent advances in AI-generated content (AIGC) have significantly accelerated animation production. To produce engaging animations, it is essential to generate coherent multi-shot video clips with narrative scripts and character references. However, existing public datasets primarily focus on real-world scenarios with global descriptions, and lack reference images for consistent character guidance. To bridge this gap, we present AnimeShooter, a reference-guided multi-shot animation dataset. AnimeShooter features comprehensive hierarchical annotations and strong visual consistency across shots through an automated pipeline. Story-level annotations provide an overview of the narrative, including the storyline, key scenes, and main character profiles with reference images, while shot-level annotations decompose the story into consecutive shots, each annotated with scene, characters, and both narrative and descriptive visual captions. Additionally, a dedicated subset, AnimeShooter-audio, offers synchronized audio tracks for each shot, along with audio descriptions and sound sources. To demonstrate the effectiveness of AnimeShooter and establish a baseline for the reference-guided multi-shot video generation task, we introduce AnimeShooterGen, which leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and video diffusion models. The reference image and previously generated shots are first processed by MLLM to produce representations aware of both reference and context, which are then used as the condition for the diffusion model to decode the subsequent shot. Experimental results show that the model trained on AnimeShooter achieves superior cross-shot visual consistency and adherence to reference visual guidance, which highlight the value of our dataset for coherent animated video generation.

Foreshadowing and payoff are ubiquitous narrative devices through which authors introduce commitments early in a story and resolve them through concrete, observable outcomes. However, despite advances in story generation, large language models (LLMs) frequently fail to bridge these long-range narrative dependencies, often leaving "Chekhov's guns" unfired even when the necessary context is present. Existing evaluations largely overlook this structural failure, focusing on surface-level coherence rather than the logical fulfillment of narrative setups. In this paper, we introduce Codified Foreshadowing-Payoff Generation (CFPG), a novel framework that reframes narrative quality through the lens of payoff realization. Recognizing that LLMs struggle to intuitively grasp the "triggering mechanism" of a foreshadowed event, CFPG transforms narrative continuity into a set of executable causal predicates. By mining and encoding Foreshadow-Trigger-Payoff triples from the BookSum corpus, we provide structured supervision that ensures foreshadowed commitments are not only mentioned but also temporally and logically fulfilled. Experiments demonstrate that CFPG significantly outperforms standard prompting baselines in payoff accuracy and narrative alignment. Our findings suggest that explicitly codifying narrative mechanics is essential for moving LLMs from surface-level fluency to genuine narrative competence.

Controllable video character replacement with a user-provided identity remains a challenging problem due to the lack of paired video data. Prior works have predominantly relied on a reconstruction-based paradigm that requires per-frame segmentation masks and explicit structural guidance (e.g., skeleton, depth). This reliance, however, severely limits their generalizability in complex scenarios involving occlusions, character-object interactions, unusual poses, or challenging illumination, often leading to visual artifacts and temporal inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose MoCha, a pioneering framework that bypasses these limitations by requiring only a single arbitrary frame mask. To effectively adapt the multi-modal input condition and enhance facial identity, we introduce a condition-aware RoPE and employ an RL-based post-training stage. Furthermore, to overcome the scarcity of qualified paired-training data, we propose a comprehensive data construction pipeline. Specifically, we design three specialized datasets: a high-fidelity rendered dataset built with Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), an expression-driven dataset synthesized by current portrait animation techniques, and an augmented dataset derived from existing video-mask pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. We will release the code to facilitate further research. Please refer to our project page for more details: orange-3dv-team.github.io/MoCha

Tuning-free personalized image generation methods have achieved significant success in maintaining facial consistency, i.e., identities, even with multiple characters. However, the lack of holistic consistency in scenes with multiple characters hampers these methods' ability to create a cohesive narrative. In this paper, we introduce StoryMaker, a personalization solution that preserves not only facial consistency but also clothing, hairstyles, and body consistency, thus facilitating the creation of a story through a series of images. StoryMaker incorporates conditions based on face identities and cropped character images, which include clothing, hairstyles, and bodies. Specifically, we integrate the facial identity information with the cropped character images using the Positional-aware Perceiver Resampler (PPR) to obtain distinct character features. To prevent intermingling of multiple characters and the background, we separately constrain the cross-attention impact regions of different characters and the background using MSE loss with segmentation masks. Additionally, we train the generation network conditioned on poses to promote decoupling from poses. A LoRA is also employed to enhance fidelity and quality. Experiments underscore the effectiveness of our approach. StoryMaker supports numerous applications and is compatible with other societal plug-ins. Our source codes and model weights are available at https://github.com/RedAIGC/StoryMaker.

Despite the significant progress that has been made in video generative models, existing state-of-the-art methods can only produce videos lasting 5-16 seconds, often labeled "long-form videos". Furthermore, videos exceeding 16 seconds struggle to maintain consistent character appearances and scene layouts throughout the narrative. In particular, multi-subject long videos still fail to preserve character consistency and motion coherence. While some methods can generate videos up to 150 seconds long, they often suffer from frame redundancy and low temporal diversity. Recent work has attempted to produce long-form videos featuring multiple characters, narrative coherence, and high-fidelity detail. We comprehensively studied 32 papers on video generation to identify key architectural components and training strategies that consistently yield these qualities. We also construct a comprehensive novel taxonomy of existing methods and present comparative tables that categorize papers by their architectural designs and performance characteristics.

Video is an increasingly prominent and information-dense medium, yet it poses substantial challenges for language models. A typical video consists of a sequence of shorter segments, or shots, that collectively form a coherent narrative. Each shot is analogous to a word in a sentence where multiple data streams of information (such as visual and auditory data) must be processed simultaneously. Comprehension of the entire video requires not only understanding the visual-audio information of each shot but also requires that the model links the ideas between each shot to generate a larger, all-encompassing story. Despite significant progress in the field, current works often overlook videos' more granular shot-by-shot semantic information. In this project, we propose a family of efficient large language vision models (LLVMs) to boost video summarization and captioning called Shotluck Holmes. By leveraging better pretraining and data collection strategies, we extend the abilities of existing small LLVMs from being able to understand a picture to being able to understand a sequence of frames. Specifically, we show that Shotluck Holmes achieves better performance than state-of-the-art results on the Shot2Story video captioning and summary task with significantly smaller and more computationally efficient models.

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.

AIGC has rapidly expanded from text-to-image generation toward high-quality multimodal synthesis across video and audio. Within this context, joint audio-video generation (JAVG) has emerged as a fundamental task that produces synchronized and semantically aligned sound and vision from textual descriptions. However, compared with advanced commercial models such as Veo3, existing open-source methods still suffer from limitations in generation quality, temporal synchrony, and alignment with human preferences. To bridge the gap, this paper presents JavisDiT++, a concise yet powerful framework for unified modeling and optimization of JAVG. First, we introduce a modality-specific mixture-of-experts (MS-MoE) design that enables cross-modal interaction efficacy while enhancing single-modal generation quality. Then, we propose a temporal-aligned RoPE (TA-RoPE) strategy to achieve explicit, frame-level synchronization between audio and video tokens. Besides, we develop an audio-video direct preference optimization (AV-DPO) method to align model outputs with human preference across quality, consistency, and synchrony dimensions. Built upon Wan2.1-1.3B-T2V, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance merely with around 1M public training entries, significantly outperforming prior approaches in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Comprehensive ablation studies have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed modules. All the code, model, and dataset are released at https://JavisVerse.github.io/JavisDiT2-page.

Current Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate a critical gap between surface-level recognition and deep narrative reasoning when processing sequential visual storytelling. Through a comprehensive investigation of manga narrative understanding, we reveal that while recent large multimodal models excel at individual panel interpretation, they systematically fail at temporal causality and cross-panel cohesion, core requirements for coherent story comprehension. We introduce a novel evaluation framework that combines fine-grained multimodal annotation, cross-modal embedding analysis, and retrieval-augmented assessment to systematically characterize these limitations. Our methodology includes (i) a rigorous annotation protocol linking visual elements to narrative structure through aligned light novel text, (ii) comprehensive evaluation across multiple reasoning paradigms, including direct inference and retrieval-augmented generation, and (iii) cross-modal similarity analysis revealing fundamental misalignments in current VLMs' joint representations. Applying this framework to Re:Zero manga across 11 chapters with 308 annotated panels, we conduct the first systematic study of long-form narrative understanding in VLMs through three core evaluation axes: generative storytelling, contextual dialogue grounding, and temporal reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that current models lack genuine story-level intelligence, struggling particularly with non-linear narratives, character consistency, and causal inference across extended sequences. This work establishes both the foundation and practical methodology for evaluating narrative intelligence, while providing actionable insights into the capability of deep sequential understanding of Discrete Visual Narratives beyond basic recognition in Multimodal Models. Project Page: https://re-verse.vercel.app

With the rapid development of foundation video generation technologies, long video generation models have exhibited promising research potential thanks to expanded content creation space. Recent studies reveal that the goal of long video generation tasks is not only to extend video duration but also to accurately express richer narrative content within longer videos. However, due to the lack of evaluation benchmarks specifically designed for long video generation models, the current assessment of these models primarily relies on benchmarks with simple narrative prompts (e.g., VBench). To the best of our knowledge, our proposed NarrLV is the first benchmark to comprehensively evaluate the Narrative expression capabilities of Long Video generation models. Inspired by film narrative theory, (i) we first introduce the basic narrative unit maintaining continuous visual presentation in videos as Temporal Narrative Atom (TNA), and use its count to quantitatively measure narrative richness. Guided by three key film narrative elements influencing TNA changes, we construct an automatic prompt generation pipeline capable of producing evaluation prompts with a flexibly expandable number of TNAs. (ii) Then, based on the three progressive levels of narrative content expression, we design an effective evaluation metric using the MLLM-based question generation and answering framework. (iii) Finally, we conduct extensive evaluations on existing long video generation models and the foundation generation models. Experimental results demonstrate that our metric aligns closely with human judgments. The derived evaluation outcomes reveal the detailed capability boundaries of current video generation models in narrative content expression.

The landscape of joint audio and video generation has been fundamentally transformed by the advent of powerful foundation models. Despite these strides, achieving cohesive multimodal customization for the simultaneous preservation of visual identities and vocal timbres across multiple interacting subjects remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present Omni-Customizer, an end-to-end framework targeted at the precise binding and seamless fusion of multimodal identity information. Specifically, we introduce an Omni-Context Fusion (OCF) module that effectively enriches the base textual prompt with dense, multimodal identity cues, along with a Masked TTS Cross-Attention (MTP-CA) mechanism explicitly designed to prevent the severe "speech leakage" problem. Within this architecture, we propose Semantic-Anchored Multimodal RoPE (SA-MRoPE) to anchor visual and audio reference tokens, along with TTS embeddings, to their corresponding semantic descriptions, enabling structured multimodal fusion and robust identity binding. Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive training strategy that incorporates interleaved audio-video scheduling to rapidly adapt the audio branch to multilingual scenarios without degrading foundational priors, and a progressive in-pair to cross-pair curriculum to facilitate the learning of high-level and robust identity features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Omni-Customizer achieves state-of-the-art performance in dual-modal customized generation, excelling across visual identity similarity, timbre consistency, precise audio-video synchronization, and overall video-audio fidelity.

Existing AI-driven video creation systems typically treat script drafting and key-shot design as two disjoint tasks: the former relies on large language models, while the latter depends on image generation models. We argue that these two tasks should be unified within a single framework, as logical reasoning and imaginative thinking are both fundamental qualities of a film director. In this work, we propose UniMAGE, a unified director model that bridges user prompts with well-structured scripts, thereby empowering non-experts to produce long-context, multi-shot films by leveraging existing audio-video generation models. To achieve this, we employ the Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that unifies text and image generation. To further enhance narrative logic and keyframe consistency, we introduce a ``first interleaving, then disentangling'' training paradigm. Specifically, we first perform Interleaved Concept Learning, which utilizes interleaved text-image data to foster the model's deeper understanding and imaginative interpretation of scripts. We then conduct Disentangled Expert Learning, which decouples script writing from keyframe generation, enabling greater flexibility and creativity in storytelling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniMAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models, generating logically coherent video scripts and visually consistent keyframe images.

Generating long-form storytelling videos with consistent visual narratives remains a significant challenge in video synthesis. We present a novel framework, dataset, and a model that address three critical limitations: background consistency across shots, seamless multi-subject shot-to-shot transitions, and scalability to hour-long narratives. Our approach introduces a background-consistent generation pipeline that maintains visual coherence across scenes while preserving character identity and spatial relationships. We further propose a transition-aware video synthesis module that generates smooth shot transitions for complex scenarios involving multiple subjects entering or exiting frames, going beyond the single-subject limitations of prior work. To support this, we contribute with a synthetic dataset of 10,000 multi-subject transition sequences covering underrepresented dynamic scene compositions. On VBench, InfinityStory achieves the highest Background Consistency (88.94), highest Subject Consistency (82.11), and the best overall average rank (2.80), showing improved stability, smoother transitions, and better temporal coherence.

We propose FairyGen, an automatic system for generating story-driven cartoon videos from a single child's drawing, while faithfully preserving its unique artistic style. Unlike previous storytelling methods that primarily focus on character consistency and basic motion, FairyGen explicitly disentangles character modeling from stylized background generation and incorporates cinematic shot design to support expressive and coherent storytelling. Given a single character sketch, we first employ an MLLM to generate a structured storyboard with shot-level descriptions that specify environment settings, character actions, and camera perspectives. To ensure visual consistency, we introduce a style propagation adapter that captures the character's visual style and applies it to the background, faithfully retaining the character's full visual identity while synthesizing style-consistent scenes. A shot design module further enhances visual diversity and cinematic quality through frame cropping and multi-view synthesis based on the storyboard. To animate the story, we reconstruct a 3D proxy of the character to derive physically plausible motion sequences, which are then used to fine-tune an MMDiT-based image-to-video diffusion model. We further propose a two-stage motion customization adapter: the first stage learns appearance features from temporally unordered frames, disentangling identity from motion; the second stage models temporal dynamics using a timestep-shift strategy with frozen identity weights. Once trained, FairyGen directly renders diverse and coherent video scenes aligned with the storyboard. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system produces animations that are stylistically faithful, narratively structured natural motion, highlighting its potential for personalized and engaging story animation. The code will be available at https://github.com/GVCLab/FairyGen

Existing large vision-language models (LVLMs) are largely limited to processing short, seconds-long videos and struggle with generating coherent descriptions for extended video spanning minutes or more. Long video description introduces new challenges, such as plot-level consistency across descriptions. To address these, we figure out audio-visual character identification, matching character names to each dialogue, as a key factor. We propose StoryTeller, a system for generating dense descriptions of long videos, incorporating both low-level visual concepts and high-level plot information. StoryTeller uses a multimodal large language model that integrates visual, audio, and text modalities to perform audio-visual character identification on minute-long video clips. The results are then fed into a LVLM to enhance consistency of video description. We validate our approach on movie description tasks and introduce MovieStory101, a dataset with dense descriptions for three-minute movie clips. To evaluate long video descriptions, we create MovieQA, a large set of multiple-choice questions for the MovieStory101 test set. We assess descriptions by inputting them into GPT-4 to answer these questions, using accuracy as an automatic evaluation metric. Experiments show that StoryTeller outperforms all open and closed-source baselines on MovieQA, achieving 9.5% higher accuracy than the strongest baseline, Gemini-1.5-pro, and demonstrating a +15.56% advantage in human side-by-side evaluations. Additionally, incorporating audio-visual character identification from StoryTeller improves the performance of all video description models, with Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o showing relative improvement of 5.5% and 13.0%, respectively, in accuracy on MovieQA.

Visual storytelling is an emerging field that combines images and narratives to create engaging and contextually rich stories. Despite its potential, generating coherent and emotionally resonant visual stories remains challenging due to the complexity of aligning visual and textual information. This paper presents a novel approach leveraging large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs) combined with instruction tuning to address these challenges. We introduce a new dataset comprising diverse visual stories, annotated with detailed captions and multimodal elements. Our method employs a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning to fine-tune the model, enhancing its narrative generation capabilities. Quantitative evaluations using GPT-4 and qualitative human assessments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing models, achieving higher scores in narrative coherence, relevance, emotional depth, and overall quality. The results underscore the effectiveness of instruction tuning and the potential of LLMs/LVLMs in advancing visual storytelling.

First-Frame Propagation (FFP) offers a promising paradigm for controllable video editing, but existing methods are hampered by a reliance on cumbersome run-time guidance. We identify the root cause of this limitation as the inadequacy of current training datasets, which are often too short, low-resolution, and lack the task diversity required to teach robust temporal priors. To address this foundational data gap, we first introduce FFP-300K, a new large-scale dataset comprising 300K high-fidelity video pairs at 720p resolution and 81 frames in length, constructed via a principled two-track pipeline for diverse local and global edits. Building on this dataset, we propose a novel framework designed for true guidance-free FFP that resolves the critical tension between maintaining first-frame appearance and preserving source video motion. Architecturally, we introduce Adaptive Spatio-Temporal RoPE (AST-RoPE), which dynamically remaps positional encodings to disentangle appearance and motion references. At the objective level, we employ a self-distillation strategy where an identity propagation task acts as a powerful regularizer, ensuring long-term temporal stability and preventing semantic drift. Comprehensive experiments on the EditVerseBench benchmark demonstrate that our method significantly outperforming existing academic and commercial models by receiving about 0.2 PickScore and 0.3 VLM score improvement against these competitors.

Narrative frames are a powerful way of conceptualizing and communicating complex, controversial ideas, however automated frame analysis to date has mostly overlooked this framing device. In this paper, we connect elements of narrativity with fundamental aspects of framing, and present a framework which formalizes and operationalizes such aspects. We annotate and release a data set of news articles in the climate change domain, analyze the dominance of narrative frame components across political leanings, and test LLMs in their ability to predict narrative frames and their components. Finally, we apply our framework in an unsupervised way to elicit components of narrative framing in a second domain, the COVID-19 crisis, where our predictions are congruent with prior theoretical work showing the generalizability of our approach.

Editing the video content with audio alignment forms a digital human-made art in current social media. However, the time-consuming and repetitive nature of manual video editing has long been a challenge for filmmakers and professional content creators alike. In this paper, we introduce CutClaw, an autonomous multi-agent framework designed to edit hours-long raw footage into meaningful short videos that leverages the capabilities of multiple Multimodal Language Models~(MLLMs) as an agent system. It produces videos with synchronized music, followed by instructions, and a visually appealing appearance. In detail, our approach begins by employing a hierarchical multimodal decomposition that captures both fine-grained details and global structures across visual and audio footage. Then, to ensure narrative consistency, a Playwriter Agent orchestrates the whole storytelling flow and structures the long-term narrative, anchoring visual scenes to musical shifts. Finally, to construct a short edited video, Editor and Reviewer Agents collaboratively optimize the final cut via selecting fine-grained visual content based on rigorous aesthetic and semantic criteria. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate that CutClaw significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality, rhythm-aligned videos. The code is available at: https://github.com/GVCLab/CutClaw.

By generating plausible and smooth transitions between two image frames, video inbetweening is an essential tool for video editing and long video synthesis. Traditional works lack the capability to generate complex large motions. While recent video generation techniques are powerful in creating high-quality results, they often lack fine control over the details of intermediate frames, which can lead to results that do not align with the creative mind. We introduce MotionBridge, a unified video inbetweening framework that allows flexible controls, including trajectory strokes, keyframes, masks, guide pixels, and text. However, learning such multi-modal controls in a unified framework is a challenging task. We thus design two generators to extract the control signal faithfully and encode feature through dual-branch embedders to resolve ambiguities. We further introduce a curriculum training strategy to smoothly learn various controls. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments have demonstrated that such multi-modal controls enable a more dynamic, customizable, and contextually accurate visual narrative.

Interactive long video generation requires prompt switching to introduce new subjects or events, while maintaining perceptual fidelity and coherent motion over extended horizons. Recent distilled streaming video diffusion models reuse a rolling KV cache for long-range generation, enabling prompt-switch interaction through re-cache at each switch. However, existing streaming methods still exhibit progressive quality degradation and weakened motion dynamics. We identify two failure modes specific to interactive streaming generation: (i) at each prompt switch, current cache maintenance cannot simultaneously retain KV-based semantic context and recent latent cues, resulting in weak boundary conditioning and reduced perceptual quality; and (ii) during distillation, unbounded time indexing induces a positional distribution shift from the pretrained backbone's bounded RoPE regime, weakening pretrained motion priors and long-horizon motion retention. To address these issues, we propose Anchor Forcing, a cache-centric framework with two designs. First, an anchor-guided re-cache mechanism stores KV states in anchor caches and warm-starts re-cache from these anchors at each prompt switch, reducing post-switch evidence loss and stabilizing perceptual quality. Second, a tri-region RoPE with region-specific reference origins, together with RoPE re-alignment distillation, reconciles unbounded streaming indices with the pretrained RoPE regime to better retain motion priors. Experiments on long videos show that our method improves perceptual quality and motion metrics over prior streaming baselines in interactive settings. Project page: https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/Anchor-Forcing

Scaling the rotary position embedding (RoPE) has become a common method for extending the context window of RoPE-based large language models (LLMs). However, existing scaling methods often rely on empirical approaches and lack a profound understanding of the internal distribution within RoPE, resulting in suboptimal performance in extending the context window length. In this paper, we propose to optimize the context window extending task from the view of rotary angle distribution. Specifically, we first estimate the distribution of the rotary angles within the model and analyze the extent to which length extension perturbs this distribution. Then, we present a novel extension strategy that minimizes the disturbance between rotary angle distributions to maintain consistency with the pre-training phase, enhancing the model's capability to generalize to longer sequences. Experimental results compared to the strong baseline methods demonstrate that our approach reduces by up to 72% of the distributional disturbance when extending LLaMA2's context window to 8k, and reduces by up to 32% when extending to 16k. On the LongBench-E benchmark, our method achieves an average improvement of up to 4.33% over existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, Our method maintains the model's performance on the Hugging Face Open LLM benchmark after context window extension, with only an average performance fluctuation ranging from -0.12 to +0.22.

A short video succeeds not simply because of what it shows, but because of how it schedules attention -- yet current multimodal models lack the structural grammar to parse or produce this organization. Existing models can describe scenes, answer event-centric questions, and read on-screen text, but they are far less reliable at identifying timeline-grounded units such as hooks, cut rationales, shot-induced tension, and platform-facing packaging cues. We propose SV6D (Structured Video in Six Dimensions), inspired by professional storyboard practice in film and television production, a representation framework that decomposes internet-native video into six complementary structural dimensions -- subject, aesthetics, camera language, editing, narrative, and dissemination -- with each label tied to physically observable evidence on the timeline. We formalize a unified optimization objective over SV6D that combines Hungarian-matched temporal alignment, dimension-wise semantic label distance, and quality regularization. Building on this framework, we present Leum-VL-8B, an 8B video-language model that realizes the SV6D objective through an expert-driven post-training pipeline, further refined through verifiable reinforcement learning on perception-oriented tasks. Leum-VL-8B achieves 70.8 on VideoMME (w/o subtitles), 70.0 on MVBench, and 61.6 on MotionBench, while remaining competitive on general multimodal evaluations such as MMBench-EN. We also construct FeedBench, a benchmark for structure-sensitive short-video understanding. Our results indicate that the missing layer in video AI is not pixel generation but structural representation: grounded on the timeline, linked to visible evidence, and directly consumable by downstream workflows such as editing, retrieval, recommendation, and generation control, including text-heavy internet video formats with overlays and image-text layouts.

Diffusion Transformers (DiT)-based video generation models with 3D full attention exhibit strong generative capabilities. Trajectory control represents a user-friendly task in the field of controllable video generation. However, existing methods either require substantial training resources or are specifically designed for U-Net, do not take advantage of the superior performance of DiT. To address these issues, we propose DiTraj, a simple but effective training-free framework for trajectory control in text-to-video generation, tailored for DiT. Specifically, first, to inject the object's trajectory, we propose foreground-background separation guidance: we use the Large Language Model (LLM) to convert user-provided prompts into foreground and background prompts, which respectively guide the generation of foreground and background regions in the video. Then, we analyze 3D full attention and explore the tight correlation between inter-token attention scores and position embedding. Based on this, we propose inter-frame Spatial-Temporal Decoupled 3D-RoPE (STD-RoPE). By modifying only foreground tokens' position embedding, STD-RoPE eliminates their cross-frame spatial discrepancies, strengthening cross-frame attention among them and thus enhancing trajectory control. Additionally, we achieve 3D-aware trajectory control by regulating the density of position embedding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods in both video quality and trajectory controllability.

We introduce TalkVerse, a large-scale, open corpus for single-person, audio-driven talking video generation designed to enable fair, reproducible comparison across methods. While current state-of-the-art systems rely on closed data or compute-heavy models, TalkVerse offers 2.3 million high-resolution (720p/1080p) audio-video synchronized clips totaling 6.3k hours. These are curated from over 60k hours of video via a transparent pipeline that includes scene-cut detection, aesthetic assessment, strict audio-visual synchronization checks, and comprehensive annotations including 2D skeletons and structured visual/audio-style captions. Leveraging TalkVerse, we present a reproducible 5B DiT baseline built on Wan2.2-5B. By utilizing a video VAE with a high downsampling ratio and a sliding window mechanism with motion-frame context, our model achieves minute-long generation with low drift. It delivers comparable lip-sync and visual quality to the 14B Wan-S2V model but with 10times lower inference cost. To enhance storytelling in long videos, we integrate an MLLM director to rewrite prompts based on audio and visual cues. Furthermore, our model supports zero-shot video dubbing via controlled latent noise injection. We open-source the dataset, training recipes, and 5B checkpoints to lower barriers for research in audio-driven human video generation. Project Page: https://zhenzhiwang.github.io/talkverse/

Recent advancements in Large Generative Models (LGMs) have revolutionized multi-modal generation. However, generating illustrated storybooks remains an open challenge, where prior works mainly decompose this task into separate stages, and thus, holistic multi-modal grounding remains limited. Besides, while safety alignment is studied for text- or image-only generation, existing works rarely integrate child-specific safety constraints into narrative planning and sequence-level multi-modal verification. To address these limitations, we propose BookAgent, a safety-aware multi-agent collaboration framework designed for high-quality, safety-aware visual narratives. Different from prior story visualization models that assume a fixed storyline sequence, BookAgent targets end-to-end storybook synthesis from a user draft by jointly planning, scripting, illustrating, and globally repairing inconsistencies. To ensure precise multi-modal grounding, BookAgent dynamically calibrates page-level alignment between textual scripts and visual layouts. Furthermore, BookAgent calibrates holistic consistency from the temporal dimension, by verifying-then-rectifying global inconsistencies in character identity and storytelling logic. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BookAgent significantly outperforms current methods in narrative coherence, visual consistency, and safety compliance, offering a robust paradigm for reliable agents in complex multi-modal creation. The implementation will be publicly released at https://github.com/bogao-code/BookAgent/tree/main.

The screenplay serves as the foundation for television production, defining narrative structure, character development, and dialogue. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential in creative writing, direct end-to-end generation approaches often fail to produce well-crafted screenplays. We argue this failure stems from forcing a single model to simultaneously master two disparate capabilities: creative narrative construction and rigid format adherence. The resulting outputs may mimic superficial style but lack the deep structural integrity and storytelling substance required for professional use. To enable LLMs to generate high-quality screenplays, we introduce Dual-Stage Refinement (DSR), a decomposed framework that decouples creative narrative generation from format conversion. The first stage transforms a brief outline into rich, novel-style prose. The second stage refines this narrative into a professionally formatted screenplay. This separation enables the model to specialize in one distinct capability at each stage. A key challenge in implementing DSR is the scarcity of paired outline-to-novel training data. We address this through hybrid data synthesis: reverse synthesis deconstructs existing screenplays into structured inputs, while forward synthesis leverages these inputs to generate high-quality narrative texts as training targets. Blind evaluations by professional screenwriters show that DSR achieves a 75% win rate against strong baselines like Gemini-2.5-Pro and reaches 82.7% of human-level performance. Our work demonstrates that decomposed generation architecture with tailored data synthesis effectively specializes LLMs in complex creative domains.

Recently, video generation has attracted massive attention and yielded noticeable outcomes. Concerning the characteristics of video, multi-text conditioning incorporating sequential events is necessary for next-step video generation. In this work, we propose a novel multi-text video generation~(MTVG) by directly utilizing a pre-trained diffusion-based text-to-video~(T2V) generation model without additional fine-tuning. To generate consecutive video segments, visual consistency generated by distinct prompts is necessary with diverse variations, such as motion and content-related transitions. Our proposed MTVG includes Dynamic Noise and Last Frame Aware Inversion which reinitialize the noise latent to preserve visual coherence between videos of different prompts and prevent repetitive motion or contents. Furthermore, we present Structure Guiding Sampling to maintain the global appearance across the frames in a single video clip, where we leverage iterative latent updates across the preceding frame. Additionally, our Prompt Generator allows for arbitrary format of text conditions consisting of diverse events. As a result, our extensive experiments, including diverse transitions of descriptions, demonstrate that our proposed methods show superior generated outputs in terms of semantically coherent and temporally seamless video.Video examples are available in our project page: https://kuai-lab.github.io/mtvg-page.

Recent text-to-image models have revolutionized image generation, but they still struggle with maintaining concept consistency across generated images. While existing works focus on character consistency, they often overlook the crucial role of scenes in storytelling, which restricts their creativity in practice. This paper introduces scene-oriented story generation, addressing two key challenges: (i) scene planning, where current methods fail to ensure scene-level narrative coherence by relying solely on text descriptions, and (ii) scene consistency, which remains largely unexplored in terms of maintaining scene consistency across multiple stories. We propose SceneDecorator, a training-free framework that employs VLM-Guided Scene Planning to ensure narrative coherence across different scenes in a ``global-to-local'' manner, and Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention to maintain long-term scene consistency and subject diversity across generated stories. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SceneDecorator, highlighting its potential to unleash creativity in the fields of arts, films, and games.

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have spurred significant interest in continuous story image generation. In this paper, we introduce Storynizor, a model capable of generating coherent stories with strong inter-frame character consistency, effective foreground-background separation, and diverse pose variation. The core innovation of Storynizor lies in its key modules: ID-Synchronizer and ID-Injector. The ID-Synchronizer employs an auto-mask self-attention module and a mask perceptual loss across inter-frame images to improve the consistency of character generation, vividly representing their postures and backgrounds. The ID-Injector utilize a Shuffling Reference Strategy (SRS) to integrate ID features into specific locations, enhancing ID-based consistent character generation. Additionally, to facilitate the training of Storynizor, we have curated a novel dataset called StoryDB comprising 100, 000 images. This dataset contains single and multiple-character sets in diverse environments, layouts, and gestures with detailed descriptions. Experimental results indicate that Storynizor demonstrates superior coherent story generation with high-fidelity character consistency, flexible postures, and vivid backgrounds compared to other character-specific methods.

A human author can write any length of story without losing coherence. Also, they always bring the story to a proper ending, an ability that current language models lack. In this work, we present the LongStory for coherent, complete, and length-controlled long story generation. LongStory introduces two novel methodologies: (1) the long and short-term contexts weight calibrator (CWC) and (2) long story structural positions (LSP). The CWC adjusts weights for long-term context Memory and short-term context Cheating, acknowledging their distinct roles. The LSP employs discourse tokens to convey the structural positions of a long story. Trained on three datasets with varied average story lengths, LongStory outperforms other baselines, including the strong story generator Plotmachine, in coherence, completeness, relevance, and repetitiveness. We also perform zero-shot tests on each dataset to assess the model's ability to predict outcomes beyond its training data and validate our methodology by comparing its performance with variants of our model.

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is an efficient position encoding approach and is widely utilized in numerous large language models (LLMs). Recently, a lot of methods have been put forward to further expand the context window based on RoPE. The core concept of those methods is to predefine or search for a set of factors to rescale the base frequencies of RoPE. Nevertheless, it is quite a challenge for existing methods to predefine an optimal factor due to the exponential search space. In view of this, we introduce PSC (Phase Shift Calibration), a small module for calibrating the frequencies predefined by existing methods. With the employment of PSC, we demonstrate that many existing methods can be further enhanced, like PI, YaRN, and LongRoPE. We conducted extensive experiments across multiple models and tasks. The results demonstrate that (1) when PSC is enabled, the comparative reductions in perplexity increase as the context window size is varied from 16k, to 32k, and up to 64k. (2) Our approach is broadly applicable and exhibits robustness across a variety of models and tasks. The code can be found at https://github.com/WNQzhu/PSC.

Counterfactual story retelling exposes LLM shortcomings in constrained narrative solution spaces where they can no longer rely on recalling memorised training data. Ground-truth-based post-training, such as SFT, fails to teach LLMs how to generate logical and rational narrative events. In this paper, we introduce Retell, Reward, Repeat (RRR), an RL-based pipeline synthesising Structuralist Narratology with scalar narrativity to teach storytelling structure. We extend the TimeTravel dataset with human-annotated stages of narrative equilibrium to evaluate reward models. By using d-RLAIF, RRR derives training signals from the narrativity of textual features without the need for reference outputs. Evaluations demonstrate that RRR-trained LLMs outperform few-shot and SFT baselines in logic, rationality, and completeness, with output quality additionally validated by blind human preference. Relying on a small, query-only dataset, RRR provides a linguistically grounded, cost-effective post-training mechanism for storytelling--a domain currently lacking effective post-training methods. RRR highlights the continued relevance of integrating established linguistic theories into contemporary NLP.

We present Story2Board, a training-free framework for expressive storyboard generation from natural language. Existing methods narrowly focus on subject identity, overlooking key aspects of visual storytelling such as spatial composition, background evolution, and narrative pacing. To address this, we introduce a lightweight consistency framework composed of two components: Latent Panel Anchoring, which preserves a shared character reference across panels, and Reciprocal Attention Value Mixing, which softly blends visual features between token pairs with strong reciprocal attention. Together, these mechanisms enhance coherence without architectural changes or fine-tuning, enabling state-of-the-art diffusion models to generate visually diverse yet consistent storyboards. To structure generation, we use an off-the-shelf language model to convert free-form stories into grounded panel-level prompts. To evaluate, we propose the Rich Storyboard Benchmark, a suite of open-domain narratives designed to assess layout diversity and background-grounded storytelling, in addition to consistency. We also introduce a new Scene Diversity metric that quantifies spatial and pose variation across storyboards. Our qualitative and quantitative results, as well as a user study, show that Story2Board produces more dynamic, coherent, and narratively engaging storyboards than existing baselines.

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved conditional video generation, particularly in the pose-guided human image animation task. Although existing methods are capable of generating high-fidelity and time-consistent animation sequences in regular motions and static scenes, there are still obvious limitations when facing complex human body motions (Hypermotion) that contain highly dynamic, non-standard motions, and the lack of a high-quality benchmark for evaluation of complex human motion animations. To address this challenge, we introduce the Open-HyperMotionX Dataset and HyperMotionX Bench, which provide high-quality human pose annotations and curated video clips for evaluating and improving pose-guided human image animation models under complex human motion conditions. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet powerful DiT-based video generation baseline and design spatial low-frequency enhanced RoPE, a novel module that selectively enhances low-frequency spatial feature modeling by introducing learnable frequency scaling. Our method significantly improves structural stability and appearance consistency in highly dynamic human motion sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset and proposed approach in advancing the generation quality of complex human motion image animations. Code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Visual storytelling aims to generate compelling narratives from image sequences. Existing models often focus on enhancing the representation of the image sequence, e.g., with external knowledge sources or advanced graph structures. Despite recent progress, the stories are often repetitive, illogical, and lacking in detail. To mitigate these issues, we present a novel framework which integrates visual representations with pretrained language models and planning. Our model translates the image sequence into a visual prefix, a sequence of continuous embeddings which language models can interpret. It also leverages a sequence of question-answer pairs as a blueprint plan for selecting salient visual concepts and determining how they should be assembled into a narrative. Automatic and human evaluation on the VIST benchmark (Huang et al., 2016) demonstrates that blueprint-based models generate stories that are more coherent, interesting, and natural compared to competitive baselines and state-of-the-art systems.

Long story generation remains a challenge for existing large language models (LLMs), primarily due to two main factors: (1) discourse coherence, which requires plot consistency, logical coherence, and completeness in the long-form generation, and (2) narrative complexity, which requires an interwoven and engaging narrative. To address these challenges, we propose StoryWriter, a multi-agent story generation framework, which consists of three main modules: (1) outline agent, which generates event-based outlines containing rich event plots, character, and event-event relationships. (2) planning agent, which further details events and plans which events should be written in each chapter to maintain an interwoven and engaging story. (3) writing agent, which dynamically compresses the story history based on the current event to generate and reflect new plots, ensuring the coherence of the generated story. We conduct both human and automated evaluation, and StoryWriter significantly outperforms existing story generation baselines in both story quality and length. Furthermore, we use StoryWriter to generate a dataset, which contains about 6,000 high-quality long stories, with an average length of 8,000 words. We train the model Llama3.1-8B and GLM4-9B using supervised fine-tuning on LongStory and develop StoryWriter_GLM and StoryWriter_GLM, which demonstrates advanced performance in long story generation.

Generating scientific manuscripts requires maintaining alignment between narrative reasoning, experimental evidence, and visual artifacts across the document lifecycle. Existing language-model generation pipelines rely on unconstrained text synthesis with validation applied only after generation, often producing structural drift, missing figures or tables, and cross-section inconsistencies. We introduce Story2Proposal, a contract-governed multi-agent framework that converts a research story into a structured manuscript through coordinated agents operating under a persistent shared visual contract. The system organizes architect, writer, refiner, and renderer agents around a contract state that tracks section structure and registered visual elements, while evaluation agents supply feedback in a generate evaluate adapt loop that updates the contract during generation. Experiments on tasks derived from the Jericho research corpus show that Story2Proposal achieved an expert evaluation score of 6.145 versus 3.963 for DirectChat (+2.182) across GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Qwen backbones. Compared with the structured generation baseline Fars, Story2Proposal obtained an average score of 5.705 versus 5.197, indicating improved structural consistency and visual alignment.

Dialogue-based Role Playing Games (RPGs) require powerful storytelling. The narratives of these may take years to write and typically involve a large creative team. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of large generative text models to assist this process. GRIM, a prototype GRaph-based Interactive narrative visualization system for gaMes, generates a rich narrative graph with branching storylines that match a high-level narrative description and constraints provided by the designer. Game designers can interactively edit the graph by automatically generating new sub-graphs that fit the edits within the original narrative and constraints. We illustrate the use of GRIM in conjunction with GPT-4, generating branching narratives for four well-known stories with different contextual constraints.

Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising use-cases in automatic story generation and understanding tasks. Our survey examines how natural language processing (NLP) research engages with fields of narrative studies, and proposes a taxonomy for ongoing efforts that reflect established distinctions in narratology. We discover patterns in the following: narrative datasets and tasks, narrative theories and NLP pipeline and methodological trends in prompting and fine-tuning. We highlight how LLMs enable easy connections of NLP pipelines with abstract narrative concepts and opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. Challenges remain in attempts to work towards any unified definition or benchmark of narrative related tasks, making model comparison difficult. For future directions, instead of the pursuit of a single, generalised benchmark for 'narrative quality', we believe that progress benefits more from efforts that focus on the following: defining and improving theory-based metrics for individual narrative attributes to incrementally improve model performance; conducting large-scale, theory-driven literary/social/cultural analysis; and creating experiments where outputs can be used to validate or refine narrative theories. This work provides a contextual foundation for more systematic and theoretically informed narrative research in NLP by providing an overview to ongoing research efforts and the broader narrative studies landscape.

We present Infinite-Story, a training-free framework for consistent text-to-image (T2I) generation tailored for multi-prompt storytelling scenarios. Built upon a scale-wise autoregressive model, our method addresses two key challenges in consistent T2I generation: identity inconsistency and style inconsistency. To overcome these issues, we introduce three complementary techniques: Identity Prompt Replacement, which mitigates context bias in text encoders to align identity attributes across prompts; and a unified attention guidance mechanism comprising Adaptive Style Injection and Synchronized Guidance Adaptation, which jointly enforce global style and identity appearance consistency while preserving prompt fidelity. Unlike prior diffusion-based approaches that require fine-tuning or suffer from slow inference, Infinite-Story operates entirely at test time, delivering high identity and style consistency across diverse prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art generation performance, while offering over 6X faster inference (1.72 seconds per image) than the existing fastest consistent T2I models, highlighting its effectiveness and practicality for real-world visual storytelling.

Creative story generation has long been a goal of NLP research. While existing methodologies have aimed to generate long and coherent stories, they fall significantly short of human capabilities in terms of diversity and character depth. To address this, we introduce a novel story generation framework called CCI (Character-centric Creative story generation via Imagination). CCI features two modules for creative story generation: IG (Image-Guided Imagination) and MW (Multi-Writer model). In the IG module, we utilize a text-to-image model to create visual representations of key story elements, such as characters, backgrounds, and main plots, in a more novel and concrete manner than text-only approaches. The MW module uses these story elements to generate multiple persona-description candidates and selects the best one to insert into the story, thereby enhancing the richness and depth of the narrative. We compared the stories generated by CCI and baseline models through statistical analysis, as well as human and LLM evaluations. The results showed that the IG and MW modules significantly improve various aspects of the stories' creativity. Furthermore, our framework enables interactive multi-modal story generation with users, opening up new possibilities for human-LLM integration in cultural development. Project page : https://www.2024cci.p-e.kr/

Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) face prohibitive computational overhead from massive audio and video tokens. Token reduction, while extensively explored for video-only LLMs, is insufficient for the audio-visual domain, as these unimodal methods cannot leverage audio-visual cross-modal synergies. Furthermore, the distinct and dynamic information densities of audio and video render static budgets per modality suboptimal. How to perform token reduction on a joint audio-visual stream thus remains an unaddressed bottleneck. To fill this gap, we introduce EchoingPixels, a framework inspired by the coexistence and interaction of visuals and sound in real-world scenes. The core of our framework is the Cross-Modal Semantic Sieve (CS2), a module enabling early audio-visual interaction. Instead of compressing modalities independently, CS2 co-attends to the joint multimodal stream and reduces tokens from an entire combined pool of audio-visual tokens rather than using fixed budgets per modality. This single-pool approach allows it to adaptively allocate the token budget across both modalities and dynamically identify salient tokens in concert. To ensure this aggressive reduction preserves the vital temporal modeling capability, we co-design a Synchronization-Augmented RoPE (Sync-RoPE) to maintain critical temporal relationships for the sparsely selected tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EchoingPixels achieves performance comparable to strong baselines using only 5-20% of the original tokens, with a 2-3x speedup and memory reduction.

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized various regions since it was proposed, and its effectiveness largely depends on the ability to encode positional information. Traditional position encoding methods exhibit significant limitations due to lack of robustness and flexibility of position. Therefore, Rotary Positional Encoding (RoPE) was proposed to alleviate these issues, which integrates positional information by rotating the embeddings in the attention mechanism. However, RoPE requires manually defined rotation matrices with limited transformation space, constraining the model's capacity. In this work, we propose ComRoPE, which generalizes RoPE by defining it in terms of trainable commuting angle matrices. Specifically, we demonstrate that pairwise commutativity of these matrices is essential for RoPE to achieve scalability and positional robustness. We formally define the RoPE Equation, which is an essential condition that ensures consistent performance with position offsets. Based on the theoretical analysis, we present two types of trainable commuting angle matrices as sufficient solutions to the RoPE equation, which significantly improve performance, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by 1.6% at training resolution and 2.9% at higher resolution on the ImageNet-1K dataset. Furthermore, our framework shows versatility in generalizing to existing RoPE formulations and offering new insights for future positional encoding research. To ensure reproducibility, the source code and instructions are available at https://github.com/Longin-Yu/ComRoPE

Treating human motion and camera trajectory generation separately overlooks a core principle of cinematography: the tight interplay between actor performance and camera work in the screen space. In this paper, we are the first to cast this task as a text-conditioned joint generation, aiming to maintain consistent on-screen framing while producing two heterogeneous, yet intrinsically linked, modalities: human motion and camera trajectories. We propose a simple, model-agnostic framework that enforces multimodal coherence via an auxiliary modality: the on-screen framing induced by projecting human joints onto the camera. This on-screen framing provides a natural and effective bridge between modalities, promoting consistency and leading to more precise joint distribution. We first design a joint autoencoder that learns a shared latent space, together with a lightweight linear transform from the human and camera latents to a framing latent. We then introduce auxiliary sampling, which exploits this linear transform to steer generation toward a coherent framing modality. To support this task, we also introduce the PulpMotion dataset, a human-motion and camera-trajectory dataset with rich captions, and high-quality human motions. Extensive experiments across DiT- and MAR-based architectures show the generality and effectiveness of our method in generating on-frame coherent human-camera motions, while also achieving gains on textual alignment for both modalities. Our qualitative results yield more cinematographically meaningful framings setting the new state of the art for this task. Code, models and data are available in our https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/vista/projects/2025_pulpmotion_courant/{project page}.

Video diffusion models substantially boost the productivity of artistic workflows with high-quality portrait video generative capacity. However, prevailing pipelines are primarily constrained to single-shot creation, while real-world applications urge for multiple shots with identity consistency and flexible content controllability. In this work, we propose EchoShot, a native and scalable multi-shot framework for portrait customization built upon a foundation video diffusion model. To start with, we propose shot-aware position embedding mechanisms within video diffusion transformer architecture to model inter-shot variations and establish intricate correspondence between multi-shot visual content and their textual descriptions. This simple yet effective design enables direct training on multi-shot video data without introducing additional computational overhead. To facilitate model training within multi-shot scenario, we construct PortraitGala, a large-scale and high-fidelity human-centric video dataset featuring cross-shot identity consistency and fine-grained captions such as facial attributes, outfits, and dynamic motions. To further enhance applicability, we extend EchoShot to perform reference image-based personalized multi-shot generation and long video synthesis with infinite shot counts. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that EchoShot achieves superior identity consistency as well as attribute-level controllability in multi-shot portrait video generation. Notably, the proposed framework demonstrates potential as a foundational paradigm for general multi-shot video modeling.

The fidelity and structural diversity of training datasets fundamentally determine the capabilities of video generation models. While commercial systems showremarkableabilitytogeneratecinematicnarratives, the progress of open-source models remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce CineDance-1M, a large-scale, open research Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) dataset designed specifically for multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Averaging 92.8 seconds and 24.2 continuous shots per video, it provides configurable, structured annotations for both audio and video modalities. This exceptional quality is achieved through a rigorous three-stage curation pipeline: i) diverse sourcing and comprehensive cleansing, ii) film-theory-inspired narrative parsing, and iii) hierarchical dual-modal captioning. For a comprehensive assessment, we propose CineBench, featuring a diverse prompt suite and a six-dimensional, human-aligned metric system tailored for complex narrative audio-video evaluation. Furthermore, we adapt LTX-2.3 into CineDance, which demonstrates exceptional single-modality quality alongside precise audio-video alignment and robust subject and environment consistency, effectively validating our curation strategy and the high quality of CineDance-1M. We anticipate that this work will serve as a solid foundation for accelerating future research in multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Our project page is available at https://aliothchen.github.io/projects/CineDance/.

Automated long-form story generation typically employs long-context large language models (LLMs) for one-shot creation, which can produce cohesive but not necessarily engaging content. We introduce Storytelling With Action Guidance (SWAG), a novel approach to storytelling with LLMs. Our approach reduces story writing to a search problem through a two-model feedback loop: one LLM generates story content, and another auxiliary LLM is used to choose the next best "action" to steer the story's future direction. Our results show that SWAG can substantially outperform previous end-to-end story generation techniques when evaluated by GPT-4 and through human evaluation, and our SWAG pipeline using only open-source models surpasses GPT-3.5-Turbo.

While diffusion models generate high-fidelity video clips, transforming them into coherent storytelling engines remains challenging. Current agentic pipelines automate this via chained modules but suffer from semantic drift and cascading failures due to independent, handcrafted prompting. We present Co-Director, a hierarchical multi-agent framework formalizing video storytelling as a global optimization problem. To ensure semantic coherence, we introduce hierarchical parameterization: a multi-armed bandit globally identifies promising creative directions, while a local multimodal self-refinement loop mitigates identity drift and ensures sequence-level consistency. This balances the exploration of novel narrative strategies with the exploitation of effective creative configurations. For evaluation, we introduce GenAD-Bench, a 400-scenario dataset of fictional products for personalized advertising. Experiments demonstrate that Co-Director significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, offering a principled approach that seamlessly generalizes to broader cinematic narratives. Project Page: https://co-director-agent.github.io/

Current video generation models achieve impressive results in single-shot generation, yet remain limited in cinematic video generation, where coherent narratives and effective multi-shot composition require explicit shot planning. To address this challenge, we propose ShotPlan, a framework for explicit multi-shot cinematic video generation built upon a video diffusion foundation model. Our method introduces learnable planning tokens that capture shot-level transition cues and can be seamlessly integrated with the original video generation tokens to control transition timestamps. Unlike standard video generation tokens, the proposed planning tokens are equipped with Fractional Temporal Rotary Position Embedding (FRoPE), enabling shot transitions to be modeled at the frame level. Experiments demonstrate that ShotPlan significantly outperforms existing cinematic video generation methods, offering more flexible shot management and stronger inter-shot consistency.

Writing compelling fiction is a multifaceted process combining elements such as crafting a plot, developing interesting characters, and using evocative language. While large language models (LLMs) show promise for story writing, they currently rely heavily on intricate prompting, which limits their use. We propose Agents' Room, a generation framework inspired by narrative theory, that decomposes narrative writing into subtasks tackled by specialized agents. To illustrate our method, we introduce Tell Me A Story, a high-quality dataset of complex writing prompts and human-written stories, and a novel evaluation framework designed specifically for assessing long narratives. We show that Agents' Room generates stories that are preferred by expert evaluators over those produced by baseline systems by leveraging collaboration and specialization to decompose the complex story writing task into tractable components. We provide extensive analysis with automated and human-based metrics of the generated output.

Visual narrative generation transforms textual narratives into sequences of images illustrating the content of the text. However, generating visual narratives that are faithful to the input text and self-consistent across generated images remains an open challenge, due to the lack of knowledge constraints used for planning the stories. In this work, we propose a new benchmark, VinaBench, to address this challenge. Our benchmark annotates the underlying commonsense and discourse constraints in visual narrative samples, offering systematic scaffolds for learning the implicit strategies of visual storytelling. Based on the incorporated narrative constraints, we further propose novel metrics to closely evaluate the consistency of generated narrative images and the alignment of generations with the input textual narrative. Our results across three generative vision models demonstrate that learning with VinaBench's knowledge constraints effectively improves the faithfulness and cohesion of generated visual narratives.

Extending context window sizes allows large language models (LLMs) to process longer sequences and handle more complex tasks. Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) has become the de facto standard due to its relative positional encoding properties that benefit long-context training. However, we observe that using RoPE with BFloat16 format results in numerical issues, causing it to deviate from its intended relative positional encoding, especially in long-context scenarios. This issue arises from BFloat16's limited precision and accumulates as context length increases, with the first token contributing significantly to this problem. To address this, we develop AnchorAttention, a plug-and-play attention method that alleviates numerical issues caused by BFloat16, improves long-context capabilities, and speeds up training. AnchorAttention reduces unnecessary attention computations, maintains semantic coherence, and boosts computational efficiency by treating the first token as a shared anchor with a consistent position ID, making it visible to all documents within the training context. Experiments on three types of LLMs demonstrate that AnchorAttention significantly improves long-context performance and reduces training time by over 50\% compared to standard full attention mechanisms, while preserving the original LLM's capabilities on general tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/haonan3/AnchorContext.

We present Echo Infinity, an autoregressive (AR) framework towards real-time infinite video generation that employs a learnable evolving memory to dynamically filter, abstract, and compress any-length history at constant cost. Existing methods mainly curate memory with predefined KV-cache schedules, fixed-ratio heuristic compression, or inference-time RoPE adaptation. These designs inevitably lose historical information and amplify compounding errors due to their limited cache window and ignorance of autoregressive generation noise. Inspired by human memory consolidation, Echo-Infinity replaces handcrafted memory curation with learnable Memory Query, which are updated by attention and a gating mechanism when past frames are evicted from the local window. The queries are optimized end-to-end with the video diffusion transformers (DiTs), forming an evolving memory that supports arbitrary compression ratios with constant computation independent of video length. They also act as a generalizable generation prior, improving quality even when only the optimized initial state is used. We further introduce Unified Relative RoPE Recipe, which anchors the sink frames to start from id 0 and lets the newest frame id grow at most to the DiTs' pretrained maximum temporal RoPE id throughout training and inference, freeing the model from the finite RoPE constraint and closing the train-test RoPE extrapolation gap. In long and short video generation, Echo-Infinity achieves state-of-the-art performance, and, to our knowledge, demonstrates promising 24-hour (>1.3 M frames) real-time rollouts for the first time, suggesting a practical path toward infinite video generation.

Position embedding is a core component of current Large Language Models (LLMs). Rotary position embedding (RoPE), a technique that encodes the position information with a rotation matrix, has been the de facto choice for position embedding in many LLMs, such as the Llama series. RoPE has been further utilized to extend long context capability, which is roughly based on adjusting the base parameter of RoPE to mitigate out-of-distribution (OOD) problems in position embedding. However, in this paper, we find that LLMs may obtain a superficial long-context ability based on the OOD theory. We revisit the role of RoPE in LLMs and propose a novel property of long-term decay, we derive that the base of RoPE bounds context length: there is an absolute lower bound for the base value to obtain certain context length capability. Our work reveals the relationship between context length and RoPE base both theoretically and empirically, which may shed light on future long context training.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show impressive performance in open-ended story generation, but fine-grained stylistic control remains limited. Existing methods often rely on shallow cues (e.g., names or topics) to simulate authorial style, without robust evaluation. In this work, we present a training framework for style-conditioned story generation using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and a custom multi-reward setup. The style reward is derived from a fine-tuned sentence transformer using authorship verification (AV) signals, combined with content and completeness scores to stabilize long-form narrative generation. We conduct experiments using fiction by Mark Twain, a prominent 19th-century American author, with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn serving as the reference style exemplar. Our 8B model outperforms larger baselines such as GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 4 in AV-style metrics, achieving a style score of 0.628 and competitive content quality. Results demonstrate the feasibility of agentic stylistic generation with moderate model size and task-specific training. While the output is clearly style-aligned, narrative completeness remains a challenge, indicating future work is needed to better model global coherence and story resolution.

Maintaining recurring character identities across scene transitions and long temporal gaps is a central challenge in narrative long video generation. Methods targeting global consistency often retrieve memory using cues that are not aligned with character identity preservation, while recent character-centric variants still rely on coarse frame-level kv memory that entangles identity with incidental visual factors and lacks a continuous update mechanism under limited memory capacity. To address these limitations, we propose SlotMem, a character-addressable internal memory framework for multi-character narrative long video generation. Specifically, SlotMem uses a Character-Semantic Probe to localize character-relevant visual tokens from cross-attention responses, and a Memory Encoder to compress DiT tokens into compact role-wise slot memory. As generation proceeds, a Memory Writer conservatively updates each character's memory with new observations, while Character-Wise Cross-Attention retrieves the role memory and injects it only into localized tokens of the same character. Experiments on multiple narrative long video generation benchmarks show that SlotMem improves long-range character consistency over existing baselines, while maintaining comparable video quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/YilaiLiu-HKU/SlotMem.

Video generation with controllable camera viewpoints is essential for applications such as interactive content creation, gaming, and simulation. Existing methods typically adapt pre-trained video models using camera poses relative to a fixed reference, e.g., the first frame. However, these encodings lack shift-invariance, often leading to poor generalization and accumulated drift. While relative camera pose embeddings defined between arbitrary view pairs offer a more robust alternative, integrating them into pre-trained video diffusion models without prohibitive training costs or architectural changes remains challenging. We introduce ReRoPE, a plug-and-play framework that incorporates relative camera information into pre-trained video diffusion models without compromising their generation capability. Our approach is based on the insight that Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) in existing models underutilize their full spectral bandwidth, particularly in the low-frequency components. By seamlessly injecting relative camera pose information into these underutilized bands, ReRoPE achieves precise control while preserving strong pre-trained generative priors. We evaluate our method on both image-to-video (I2V) and video-to-video (V2V) tasks in terms of camera control accuracy and visual fidelity. Our results demonstrate that ReRoPE offers a training-efficient path toward controllable, high-fidelity video generation. See project page for more results: https://sisyphe-lee.github.io/ReRoPE/

Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) have been shown to effectively encode positional information in transformer-based language models. However, these models fail to generalize past the sequence length they were trained on. We present YaRN (Yet another RoPE extensioN method), a compute-efficient method to extend the context window of such models, requiring 10x less tokens and 2.5x less training steps than previous methods. Using YaRN, we show that LLaMA models can effectively utilize and extrapolate to context lengths much longer than their original pre-training would allow, while also surpassing previous the state-of-the-art at context window extension. In addition, we demonstrate that YaRN exhibits the capability to extrapolate beyond the limited context of a fine-tuning dataset. We publish the checkpoints of Llama 2 7B/13B fine-tuned using YaRN with 64k and 128k context windows at https://github.com/jquesnelle/yarn

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.

As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space focuses on identifying surface-level signatures of AI writing, we ask instead whether AI-generated stories can be distinguished from human ones without relying on stylistic signals, focusing on discourse-level narrative choices such as character agency and chronological discontinuity. We propose StoryScope, a pipeline that automatically induces a fine-grained, interpretable feature space of discourse-level narrative features across 10 dimensions. We apply StoryScope to a parallel corpus of 10,272 writing prompts, each written by a human author and five LLMs, yielding 61,608 stories, each ~5,000 words, and 304 extracted features per story. Narrative features alone achieve 93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution, retaining over 97% of the performance of models that include stylistic cues. A compact set of 30 core narrative features captures much of this signal: AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist' choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity. Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.

We propose RoPECraft, a training-free video motion transfer method for diffusion transformers that operates solely by modifying their rotary positional embeddings (RoPE). We first extract dense optical flow from a reference video, and utilize the resulting motion offsets to warp the complex-exponential tensors of RoPE, effectively encoding motion into the generation process. These embeddings are then further optimized during denoising time steps via trajectory alignment between the predicted and target velocities using a flow-matching objective. To keep the output faithful to the text prompt and prevent duplicate generations, we incorporate a regularization term based on the phase components of the reference video's Fourier transform, projecting the phase angles onto a smooth manifold to suppress high-frequency artifacts. Experiments on benchmarks reveal that RoPECraft outperforms all recently published methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

We present CineVerse, a novel framework for the task of cinematic scene composition. Similar to traditional multi-shot generation, our task emphasizes the need for consistency and continuity across frames. However, our task also focuses on addressing challenges inherent to filmmaking, such as multiple characters, complex interactions, and visual cinematic effects. In order to learn to generate such content, we first create the CineVerse dataset. We use this dataset to train our proposed two-stage approach. First, we prompt a large language model (LLM) with task-specific instructions to take in a high-level scene description and generate a detailed plan for the overall setting and characters, as well as the individual shots. Then, we fine-tune a text-to-image generation model to synthesize high-quality visual keyframes. Experimental results demonstrate that CineVerse yields promising improvements in generating visually coherent and contextually rich movie scenes, paving the way for further exploration in cinematic video synthesis.

Story visualization (SV) is a challenging text-to-image generation task for the difficulty of not only rendering visual details from the text descriptions but also encoding a long-term context across multiple sentences. While prior efforts mostly focus on generating a semantically relevant image for each sentence, encoding a context spread across the given paragraph to generate contextually convincing images (e.g., with a correct character or with a proper background of the scene) remains a challenge. To this end, we propose a novel memory architecture for the Bi-directional Transformer framework with an online text augmentation that generates multiple pseudo-descriptions as supplementary supervision during training for better generalization to the language variation at inference. In extensive experiments on the two popular SV benchmarks, i.e., the Pororo-SV and Flintstones-SV, the proposed method significantly outperforms the state of the arts in various metrics including FID, character F1, frame accuracy, BLEU-2/3, and R-precision with similar or less computational complexity.