# Adaptive Visual Conditioning for Semantic Consistency in Diffusion-Based Story Continuation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13787 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13787/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [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)
- [StoryGAN: A Sequential Conditional GAN for Story Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02784/) (2018)
- [Intelligent Grimm -- Open-ended Visual Storytelling via Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00973/) (2023)
- [StoryDALL-E: Adapting Pretrained Text-to-Image Transformers for Story Continuation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06192/) (2022)
- [Improving Generation and Evaluation of Visual Stories via Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10026/) (2021)
- [Improved Visual Story Generation with Adaptive Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16811/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Story continuation focuses on generating the next image in a narrative sequence so that it remains coherent with both the ongoing text description and the previously observed images. A central challenge in this setting lies in utilizing prior visual context effectively, while ensuring semantic alignment with the current textual input. In this work, we introduce AVC (Adaptive Visual Conditioning), a framework for diffusion-based story continuation. AVC employs the CLIP model to retrieve the most semantically aligned image from previous frames. Crucially, when no sufficiently relevant image is found, AVC adaptively restricts the influence of prior visuals to only the early stages of the diffusion process. This enables the model to exploit visual context when beneficial, while avoiding the injection of misleading or irrelevant information. Furthermore, we improve data quality by re-captioning a noisy dataset using large language models, thereby strengthening textual supervision and semantic alignment. Quantitative results and human evaluations demonstrate that AVC achieves superior coherence, semantic consistency, and visual fidelity compared to strong baselines, particularly in challenging cases where prior visuals conflict with the current input.