MangaFlow: An End-to-End Agentic Framework for Controllable Story to Manga Generation
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents
Abstract (arXiv)
End-to-end manga generation is a structured visual storytelling task that requires story decomposition, recurring character and scene grounding, page layout design, panel rendering, page composition, and lettering. However, existing generative models often perform direct page synthesis, entangling these factors in a single visual output and limiting precise control over layout geometry, visual references, and cross-panel consistency. To address these limitations, we propose MangaFlow, an agentic framework for controllable long-form manga generation that decomposes manga creation into planning, grounding, layout construction, reference-conditioned rendering, composition, and text placement. By treating layout and visual references as explicit intermediate variables, MangaFlow enables both simple text-to-manga generation and more precise user-controlled manga creation. This design exposes layout, visual assets, and lettering as editable intermediate controls for refining panel geometry, references, and text placement. To support long-form consistency, MangaFlow introduces a story section memory that links section descriptions with corresponding character, scene, and object references for reuse across panels. We further present a meta-benchmark for evaluating layout controllability, visual consistency, and generation quality. Experiments show that MangaFlow improves layout adherence and cross-panel consistency over direct generation baselines while supporting flexible human control.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 25 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.
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25 of 41 references.
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Other references · 24
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2023BoxDiff: Text-to-Image Synthesis with Training-Free Box-Constrained Diffusioncited by 280
- 2024StoryDiffusion: Consistent Self-Attention for Long-Range Image and Video Generationcited by 240
- 2023LayoutDM: Discrete Diffusion Model for Controllable Layout Generationcited by 141
- 2018StoryGAN: A Sequential Conditional GAN for Story Visualizationcited by 137
- 2022Make-A-Story: Visual Memory Conditioned Consistent Story Generationcited by 76
- 2022StoryDALL-E: Adapting Pretrained Text-to-Image Transformers for Story Continuationcited by 74
- 2024DreamStory: Open-Domain Story Visualization by LLM-Guided Multi-Subject Consistent Diffusioncited by 46
- 2020Building a Manga Dataset "Manga109" with Annotations for Multimedia Applicationscited by 37
- 2022Character-Centric Story Visualization via Visual Planning and Token Alignmentcited by 32
- 2023StoryGPT-V: Large Language Models as Consistent Story Visualizerscited by 25
- 2024DiffSensei: Bridging Multi-Modal LLMs and Diffusion Models for Customized Manga Generationcited by 16
12 more
- 2024CoMix: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Task Comic Understandingcited by 15
- 2023Manga109Dialog: A Large-scale Dialogue Dataset for Comics Speaker Detectioncited by 13
- 2024Story-Iter: A Training-free Iterative Paradigm for Long Story Visualizationcited by 12
- 2024StoryWeaver: A Unified World Model for Knowledge-Enhanced Story Character Customizationcited by 9
- 2024One missing piece in Vision and Language: A Survey on Comics Understandingcited by 8
- 2023Generating coherent comic with rich story using ChatGPT and Stable Diffusioncited by 6
- 2024Collaborative Comic Generation: Integrating Visual Narrative Theories with AI Models for Enhanced Creativitycited by 6
- 2024Manga Generation via Layout-controllable Diffusioncited by 5
- 2025VisAgent: Narrative-Preserving Story Visualization Frameworkcited by 4
- 2021Automatic Comic Generation with Stylistic Multi-page Layouts and Emotion-driven Text Balloon Generationcited by 3
- 2024How Panel Layouts Define Manga: Insights from Visual Ablation Experimentscited by 1
- 2026LogiStory: A Logic-Aware Framework for Multi-Image Story Visualizationcited by 1
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
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