# DreamStory: Open-Domain Story Visualization by LLM-Guided Multi-Subject Consistent Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12899 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12899/

## Key facts

- Cited by 47 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 87 of its 102 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2024.

## 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 87)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Allegro: Open the Black Box of Commercial-Level Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15458/) (2024)
- [StoryMem: Multi-shot Long Video Storytelling with Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19539/) (2025)
- [ShotAdapter: Text-to-Multi-Shot Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07652/) (2025)
- [StoryMaker: Towards Holistic Consistent Characters in Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12576/) (2024)
- [MM-StoryAgent: Immersive Narrated Storybook Video Generation with a Multi-Agent Paradigm across Text, Image and Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05242/) (2025)
- [AniMaker: Multi-Agent Animated Storytelling with MCTS-Driven Clip Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10540/) (2025)
- [Story2Board: A Training-Free Approach for Expressive Storyboard Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09983/) (2025)
- [AnyStory: Towards Unified Single and Multiple Subject Personalization in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09503/) (2025)
- [Unbounded: A Generative Infinite Game of Character Life Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18975/) (2024)
- [Story-Iter: A Training-free Iterative Paradigm for Long Story Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06244/) (2024)
- [One missing piece in Vision and Language: A Survey on Comics Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09502/) (2024)
- [MultiHuman-Testbench: Benchmarking Image Generation for Multiple Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20879/) (2025)
- [DreamRunner: Fine-Grained Compositional Story-to-Video Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Motion Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16657/) (2024)
- [Object Isolated Attention for Consistent Story Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23353/) (2025)
- [AnimeGamer: Infinite Anime Life Simulation with Next Game State Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01014/) (2025)
- [ViStoryBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Story Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24862/) (2025)
- [AnimeAgent: Is the Multi-Agent via Image-to-Video models a Good Disney Storytelling Artist?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20664/) (2026)
- [CineVerse: Consistent Keyframe Synthesis for Cinematic Scene Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19894/) (2025)
- [FairyGen: Storied Cartoon Video from a Single Child-Drawn Character](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21272/) (2025)
- [Camera Artist: A Multi-Agent Framework for Cinematic Language Storytelling Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09195/) (2026)
- [Improving Multi-Subject Consistency in Open-Domain Image Generation with Isolation and Reposition Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19261/) (2024)
- [ViSTA: Visual Storytelling using Multi-modal Adapters for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12198/) (2025)
- [StoryBlender: Inter-Shot Consistent and Editable 3D Storyboard with Spatial-temporal Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03315/) (2026)
- [Better Call CineCrew: Consistent Ultra-Long Narrative-to-Film Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07720/) (2026)
- [Scene-Action Prompt Fusion for Coherent Text-to-Video Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06310/) (2025)
- [StorySync: Training-Free Subject Consistency in Text-to-Image Generation via Region Harmonization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03735/) (2025)
- [Mind-of-Director: Multi-modal Agent-Driven Film Previsualization via Collaborative Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14790/) (2026)
- [EvoState: Closed-Loop Visual State Management for Long-Form Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16184/) (2026)
- [FreeStory: Training-Free Character Consistency for Free-Form Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25079/) (2026)
- [LLMs Behind the Scenes: Enabling Narrative Scene Illustration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22940/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Story visualization aims to create visually compelling images or videos corresponding to textual narratives. Despite recent advances in diffusion models yielding promising results, existing methods still struggle to create a coherent sequence of subject-consistent frames based solely on a story. To this end, we propose DreamStory, an automatic open-domain story visualization framework by leveraging the LLMs and a novel multi-subject consistent diffusion model. DreamStory consists of (1) an LLM acting as a story director and (2) an innovative Multi-Subject consistent Diffusion model (MSD) for generating consistent multi-subject across the images. First, DreamStory employs the LLM to generate descriptive prompts for subjects and scenes aligned with the story, annotating each scene's subjects for subsequent subject-consistent generation. Second, DreamStory utilizes these detailed subject descriptions to create portraits of the subjects, with these portraits and their corresponding textual information serving as multimodal anchors (guidance). Finally, the MSD uses these multimodal anchors to generate story scenes with consistent multi-subject. Specifically, the MSD includes Masked Mutual Self-Attention (MMSA) and Masked Mutual Cross-Attention (MMCA) modules. MMSA and MMCA modules ensure appearance and semantic consistency with reference images and text, respectively. Both modules employ masking mechanisms to prevent subject blending. To validate our approach and promote progress in story visualization, we established a benchmark, DS-500, which can assess the overall performance of the story visualization framework, subject-identification accuracy, and the consistency of the generation model. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of DreamStory in both subjective and objective evaluations. Please visit our project homepage at https://dream-xyz.github.io/dreamstory.