StoryTailor:A Zero-Shot Pipeline for Action-Rich Multi-Subject Visual Narratives

We present SubjectAnchor, a Subject-Aware Memory-to-Video paradigm for multi-shot storytelling in which the current shot is generated by conditioning on explicit visual memories extracted from previous shots. The objective is to preserve subject identity and scene consistency across cuts while retaining the controllability of shot-wise prompting. Built on Wan2.2-I2V-A14B, SubjectAnchor contains three key components: subject-related memory construction, subject-aware temporal rotary position encoding, and memory-aware attention partition. For each target shot, the method constructs a compact memory bank by tracing each required subject to its historical appearance and retrieving the most relevant precomputed keyframes. These memory frames are encoded into the model input as explicit visual conditions, while different subjects are assigned to separated negative temporal slots to reduce identity interference. In addition, memory-aware attention partition regulates the interaction between memory tokens and generated content within a shared backbone. This formulation preserves the appearance anchoring of explicit visual memory while remaining compatible with script-driven shot-by-shot generation. Experiments show that SubjectAnchor improves cross-shot identity consistency over representative memory-based and holistic baselines while maintaining competitive visual quality.

Story Visualization aims to generate a sequence of images that faithfully depicts a textual narrative that preserve character identity, spatial configuration, and stylistic coherence as the narratives unfold. Maintaining such cross-frame consistency has traditionally relied on explicit memory banks, architectural expansion, or auxiliary language models, resulting in substantial parameter growth and inference overhead. We introduce ReCap, a lightweight consistency framework that improves character stability and visual fidelity without modifying the base diffusion backbone. ReCap's CORE (COnditional frame REferencing) module treats anaphors, in our case pronouns, as visual anchors, activating only when characters are referred to by a pronoun and conditioning on the preceding frame to propagate visual identity. This selective design avoids unconditional cross-frame conditioning and introduces only 149K additional parameters, a fraction of the cost of memory-bank and LLM-augmented approaches. To further stabilize identity, we incorporate SemDrift (Guided Semantic Drift Correction) applied only during training. When text is vague or referential, the denoiser lacks a visual anchor for identity-defining attributes, causing character appearance to drift across frames, SemDrift corrects this by aligning denoiser representations with pretrained DINOv3 visual embeddings, enforcing semantic identity stability at zero inference cost. ReCap outperforms previous state-of-the-art, StoryGPT-V, on the two main benchmarks for story visualization by 2.63% Character-Accuracy on FlintstonesSV and by 5.65% on PororoSV, establishing a new state-of-the-art character consistency on both benchmarks. Furthermore, we extend story visualization to human-centric narratives derived from real films, demonstrating the capability of ReCap beyond stylized cartoon domains.

Long-form visual storytelling requires maintaining continuity across shots, including consistent characters, stable environments, and smooth scene transitions. While existing generative models can produce strong individual frames, they fail to preserve such continuity, leading to appearance changes, inconsistent backgrounds, and abrupt scene shifts. We introduce CANVAS (Continuity-Aware Narratives via Visual Agentic Storyboarding), a multi-agent framework that explicitly plans visual continuity in multi-shot narratives. CANVAS enforces coherence through character continuity, persistent background anchors, and location-aware scene planning for smooth transitions within the same setting We evaluate CANVAS on two storyboard generation benchmarks ST-BENCH and ViStoryBench and introduce a new challenging benchmark HardContinuityBench for long-range narrative consistency. CANVAS consistently outperforms the best-performing baseline, improving background continuity by 21.6%, character consistency by 9.6% and props consistency by 7.6%.