# Synthesizing Coherent Story with Auto-Regressive Latent Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10950/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 37 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01261/) (2018)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Scene: Scene-Based Text-to-Image Generation with Human Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13131/) (2022)
- [Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04702/) (2021)
- [Re-Imagen: Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Image Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14491/) (2022)
- [Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03968/) (2016)
- [MirrorGAN: Learning Text-to-image Generation by Redescription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05854/) (2019)
- [StoryGAN: A Sequential Conditional GAN for Story Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02784/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [ELITE: Encoding Visual Concepts into Textual Embeddings for Customized Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13848/) (2023)
- [Text-to-image Diffusion Models in Generative AI: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07909/) (2023)
- [ANOLE: An Open, Autoregressive, Native Large Multimodal Models for Interleaved Image-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06135/) (2024)
- [HumanSD: A Native Skeleton-Guided Diffusion Model for Human Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04269/) (2023)
- [One-Minute Video Generation with Test-Time Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05298/) (2025)
- [MovieDreamer: Hierarchical Generation for Coherent Long Visual Sequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16655/) (2024)
- [MM-Interleaved: Interleaved Image-Text Generative Modeling via Multi-modal Feature Synchronizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10208/) (2024)
- [Intelligent Grimm -- Open-ended Visual Storytelling via Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00973/) (2023)
- [TaleCrafter: Interactive Story Visualization with Multiple Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18247/) (2023)
- [SEED-Story: Multimodal Long Story Generation with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08683/) (2024)
- [Directed Diffusion: Direct Control of Object Placement through Attention Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13153/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-Based Adversarial Sample Generation for Improved Stealthiness and Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16494/) (2023)
- [Boosting Consistency in Story Visualization with Rich-Contextual Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02482/) (2024)
- [Text2Earth: Unlocking Text-driven Remote Sensing Image Generation with a Global-Scale Dataset and a Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00895/) (2025)
- [DreamStory: Open-Domain Story Visualization by LLM-Guided Multi-Subject Consistent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12899/) (2024)
- [Mind the Time: Temporally-Controlled Multi-Event Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05263/) (2024)
- [VideoGen-of-Thought: Step-by-step generating multi-shot video with minimal manual intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15138/) (2025)
- [StoryAgent: Customized Storytelling Video Generation via Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04925/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot Generation of Coherent Storybook from Plain Text Story using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03900/) (2023)
- [StoryGPT-V: Large Language Models as Consistent Story Visualizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02252/) (2023)
- [MegaFusion: Extend Diffusion Models towards Higher-resolution Image Generation without Further Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11001/) (2024)
- [Improved Visual Story Generation with Adaptive Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16811/) (2023)
- [StoryImager: A Unified and Efficient Framework for Coherent Story Visualization and Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05979/) (2024)
- [Personalized Image Generation with Deep Generative Models: A Decade Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13081/) (2025)
- [Synthesizing Long-Term Human Motions with Diffusion Models via Coherent Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01850/) (2023)
- [DiffSensei: Bridging Multi-Modal LLMs and Diffusion Models for Customized Manga Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07589/) (2024)
- [MiLA: Multi-view Intensive-fidelity Long-term Video Generation World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15875/) (2025)
- [Towards Effective Usage of Human-Centric Priors in Diffusion Models for Text-based Human Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05239/) (2024)
- [Generative AI for Cel-Animation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06250/) (2025)
- [OpenLEAF: Open-Domain Interleaved Image-Text Generation and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07749/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conditioned diffusion models have demonstrated state-of-the-art text-to-image synthesis capacity. Recently, most works focus on synthesizing independent images; While for real-world applications, it is common and necessary to generate a series of coherent images for story-stelling. In this work, we mainly focus on story visualization and continuation tasks and propose AR-LDM, a latent diffusion model auto-regressively conditioned on history captions and generated images. Moreover, AR-LDM can generalize to new characters through adaptation. To our best knowledge, this is the first work successfully leveraging diffusion models for coherent visual story synthesizing. Quantitative results show that AR-LDM achieves SoTA FID scores on PororoSV, FlintstonesSV, and the newly introduced challenging dataset VIST containing natural images. Large-scale human evaluations show that AR-LDM has superior performance in terms of quality, relevance, and consistency.