# NEGATE: Constrained Semantic Guidance for Linguistic Negation in Text-to-Video Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06533 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06533/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Discrete and text diffusion, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 43 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Discrete and text diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/discrete-and-text-diffusion/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [Compositional Visual Generation with Composable Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01714/) (2022)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [Erasing Concepts from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07345/) (2023)
- [Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03162/) (2022)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [Latent Video Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13221/) (2022)
- [Unified Concept Editing in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14761/) (2023)
- [LAVIE: High-Quality Video Generation with Cascaded Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15103/) (2023)
- [ControlVideo: Training-free Controllable Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13077/) (2023)
- [Show-1: Marrying Pixel and Latent Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15818/) (2023)
- [Preserve Your Own Correlation: A Noise Prior for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10474/) (2023)
- [Emu Video: Factorizing Text-to-Video Generation by Explicit Image Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10709/) (2023)
- [StreamingT2V: Consistent, Dynamic, and Extendable Long Video Generation from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14773/) (2024)
- [SugarCrepe: Fixing Hackable Benchmarks for Vision-Language Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14610/) (2023)
- [SEINE: Short-to-Long Video Diffusion Model for Generative Transition and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20700/) (2023)
- [FreeNoise: Tuning-Free Longer Video Diffusion via Noise Rescheduling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15169/) (2023)
- [NUWA-XL: Diffusion over Diffusion for eXtremely Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12346/) (2023)
- [Linguistic Binding in Diffusion Models: Enhancing Attribute Correspondence through Attention Map Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08877/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo 1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18870/) (2025)
- [Gen-L-Video: Multi-Text to Long Video Generation via Temporal Co-Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18264/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DCR: Counterfactual Attractor Guidance for Rare Compositional Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06512/) (2026)
- [TPD: Temporal Prior Decoupling for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26706/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Negation is a fundamental linguistic operator, yet it remains inadequately modeled in diffusion-based generative systems. In this work, we present a formal treatment of linguistic negation in diffusion-based generative models by modeling it as a structured feasibility constraint on semantic guidance within diffusion dynamics. Rather than introducing heuristics or retraining model parameters, we reinterpret classifier-free guidance as defining a semantic update direction and enforce negation by projecting the update onto a convex constraint set derived from linguistic structure. This novel formulation provides a unified framework for handling diverse negation phenomena, including object absence, graded non-inversion semantics, multi-negation composition, and scope-sensitive disambiguation. Our approach is training-free, compatible with pretrained diffusion backbones, and naturally extends from image generation to temporally evolving video trajectories. In addition, we introduce a structured negation-centric benchmark suite that isolates distinct linguistic failure modes in generative systems, to further research in this area. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves robust negation compliance while preserving visual fidelity and structural coherence, establishing the first unified formulation of linguistic negation in diffusion-based generative models beyond representation-level evaluation.