RECAP-Forcing: Retaining Content Appearances for Long Video Generation

Long-horizon video generation requires retaining an ever-expanding history, but conditioning on its growing token sequence is costly. Existing methods restrict or compress historical context, potentially losing information needed for future generation. This work proposes ReCam, which groups local spatiotemporal blocks of historical latents into vectors and projects them directly into the high-dimensional hidden space of a Diffusion Transformer. The model learns to use the resulting memory tokens through native self-attention, reducing token count while retaining block-level access to the full history. To mitigate temporal drift during autoregressive rollout, we further introduce dual-pointer denoising with separate noise schedules for recent context and target frames. Among the evaluated methods, ReCam achieves the highest VBench-Long overall score of 80.1 and competitive static-scene revisitation performance on R2M-Bench. It also leads on all four consistency metrics for off-screen subject reappearance, including clothing consistency of 4.09 versus 3.03 for the best baseline.

Long-form video generation requires recurring subjects to remain consistent across various shots, viewpoints, motions, and scene transitions. Existing temporal decomposition methods improve scalability by generating videos shot by shot. However, they mainly focus on optimizing plausible next-shot continuations without verifying whether the historical memory preserves identity-critical subject evidence. Consequently, as generation proceeds, recurring subjects may be diluted, overwritten, or forgotten. In this paper, we propose Memento, a subject-reconstruction-guided framework that treats subject preservation as an explicit identity grounding problem, based on the premise that a memory bank faithfully preserving a subject should support reconstructing that subject from memory alone. Specifically, Memento jointly trains autoregressive next-shot generation with memory-based subject reconstruction, recovering target appearances using historical memory and global story captions. To disentangle long-range subject evidence from short-range cues, Memento introduces a dual-query memory mechanism, where one query retrieves identity-relevant memory and the other selects short-context keyframes for coherent continuation. Additionally, a subject-aware cinematic data pipeline provides precise reconstruction supervision via consistent, pronoun-free subject descriptions. Experiments demonstrate that Memento achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-term subject consistency, cross-shot coherence, and visual quality.

Autoregressive video diffusion has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for long-video generation, enabling causal synthesis beyond the temporal limits of bidirectional models. Existing forcing-based training strategies reduce exposure bias by conditioning models on their own predictions during rollout, yet minute-scale generation remains challenging due to progressive temporal degradation and constrained motion evolution. In this work, we study the role of temporal KV memory during long-horizon autoregressive inference. Our analysis shows that simply retaining more historical frames does not consistently improve generation quality; instead, both the quantity and temporal placement of memory strongly affect motion dynamics. These findings suggest that temporal memory should be treated as structured context rather than a homogeneous chronological buffer. Motivated by this observation, we introduce Relax Forcing, a training-free memory mechanism for autoregressive video diffusion. Relax Forcing decomposes temporal context into three functional components: Sink frames that provide global stability, Tail frames that preserve short-term continuity, and dynamically selected History frames that supply mid-range motion structure. History frames are selected using a relaxation-based criterion that encourages alignment with global anchors while suppressing redundancy with recent context. This role-aware sparse memory design mitigates error accumulation during long-horizon rollout while preserving motion evolution and reducing attention overhead. Experiments on VBench-Long show that Relax Forcing improves long-video generation, achieving stronger motion dynamics and higher overall scores than existing autoregressive baselines. These results indicate that structured temporal memory is an effective and complementary direction for scalable long-video generation.