Title: SceneDecorator: Towards Scene-Oriented Story Generation with Scene Planning and Scene Consistency
Venue: NeurIPS 2025
Accepted: yes
Keywords: Story Generation

Scene Planning

Scene Consistency
Abstract: Recent text-to-image models have revolutionized image generation, but they still struggle with maintaining concept consistency across generated images. While existing works focus on character consistency, they often overlook the crucial role of scenes in storytelling, which restricts their creativity in practice. This paper introduces scene-oriented story generation, addressing two key challenges:  (i) scene planning, where current methods fail to ensure scene-level narrative coherence by relying solely on text descriptions, and (ii) scene consistency, which remains largely unexplored in terms of maintaining scene consistency across multiple stories. We propose SceneDecorator, a training-free framework that employs VLM-Guided Scene Planning to ensure narrative coherence across different scenes in a ``global-to-local'' manner, and Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention to maintain long-term scene consistency and subject diversity across generated stories. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SceneDecorator, highlighting its potential to unleash creativity in the fields of arts, films, and games.

SceneDecorator:

Abstract

Recent text-to-image models have revolutionized image generation, but they still struggle with maintaining concept consistency across generated images. While existing works focus on character consistency, they often overlook the crucial role of scenes in storytelling, which restricts their creativity in practice. This paper introduces scene-oriented story generation , addressing two key challenges: (i) scene planning , where current methods fail to ensure scene-level narrative coherence by relying solely on text descriptions, and (ii) scene consistency , which remains largely unexplored in terms of maintaining scene consistency across multiple stories. We propose SceneDecorator , a training-free framework that employs VLM-Guided Scene Planning to ensure narrative coherence across different scenes in a 'globalto-local' manner, and Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention to maintain long-term scene consistency and subject diversity across generated stories. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SceneDecorator, highlighting its potential to unleash creativity in the fields of arts, films, and games.

1 Introduction

Text-to-image (T2I) models [1, 2, 3, 4] have demonstrated impressive proficiency in generating highquality images from text descriptions. However, they struggle to maintain concept consistency across generated images due to their stochastic nature [5]. Such consistency holds significant commercial value and application potential in education [6], art [7, 8], and entertainment [9], underscoring the need for the task of story generation that can create multiple images with consistent concepts [10, 11].

Considering the significance of story generation, numerous prior studies have been devoted to advancing this important task. Early studies such as PorotoSV [12] and FlintstonesSV [13] are typically trained on given datasets with consistent characters. These methods achieve decent performance in specific domains but are inherently limited in generalization. Leveraging the exceptional generation quality of diffusion models, subsequent works [5, 14, 15, 16, 17] have begun exploring open-domain characters. This advancement achieves a compelling balance between realism and aesthetics.

Although existing story generation methods have made significant progress in character consistency, they usually overly focus on preserving characters while neglecting scene depiction, which is equally crucial for conveying the narrative of stories [18]. In light of that, the motivation for this paper arises: How can we achieve story generation from the perspective of scenes? In this work, we formulate scene-oriented story generation , which presents two primary challenges: (i) Scene planning : Existing approaches generate the scenes of story images solely based on text descriptions, leading to a lack of scene-level narrative coherence. This coherence also plays a vital role in enhancing storytelling visual fluency. (ii) Scene consistency : In practical scenarios like film storyboarding [19], it is crucial to generate diverse story images with consistent scenes that align with different plots and characters. Maintaining long-term scene consistency across multiple stories remains underexplored.

This paper introduce SceneDecorator , a training-free framework for scene-oriented story generation (see Figure 1), aimed at addressing the above challenges. SceneDecorator contains two key techniques:

(i) To tackle scene planning , we develop a VLM-Guided Scene Planning strategy. It utilize the visual perception of Vision-Language-Model (VLM) to create scenes and story sub-prompts in a 'global-to-local' manner. Specifically, this strategy begins with a VLM that interprets the userprovided theme to generate a corresponding global scene description. The description is then passed into an off-the-shelf image generator to create a meaningful global scene image. Finally, this image is further deconstructed by the VLM into multiple local scenes and story sub-prompts, serving as the basis for subsequent story generation. This scene planning strategy ensures scene-level narrative continuity, as the local scenes are derived from a global scene with shared scene semantics.

(ii) To maintain scene consistency , we design a novel Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention mechanism. Specifically, it first employs a Mask-Guided Scene Injection module, which enhances the IP-Adapter [20] with cross-attention masks to guide fine-grained scene injection, thereby ensuring subject style diversity. Then, the latent representations interact across scenes through a Scene-Sharing Attention module during the denoising process, thereby preserving scene consistency across generated stories. Furthermore, this attention module is further extended by an Extrapolable Noise Blending scheme, thereby achieving long-term scene consistency across stories with low overhead.

Extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons validate the effectiveness of our SceneDecorator, with ablation studies and diverse applications showcasing its robustness and versatility.

2 Related Works

Controllable Text-to-Image Generation. Given the ambiguity of textual descriptions in guiding image style [21, 8], content [22, 23], and layout [24], many works have been dedicated to enhancing control in text-to-image (T2I) generation. Prior works like ControlNet [25] and T2I-Adapter [26] tackle this challenge by employing trainable modules. These modules enhance control over visual style and spatial organization, making them more effective than naive T2I models [27, 28, 29, 30]. In addition, some studies have also explored several advanced techniques like prompt engineering [31] and cross-attention constraints [32, 33], enabling better generation regulation. Moreover, some approaches focus on visual content generation with diverse task paradigms [34, 35, 36, 37, 38], while others focus on more practical generation in real-world applications [39, 40, 41, 42, 43].

Story-N: The girl dances among

the trees, feeling the magic of

the night.

Theme:

'

An Enchanted Forest.

'

Conceptualizing the Global Scene

Crafting Local Scenes and Sub-prompts

Visualizing the

Global Scene

Story-1: A fox explores the

meadow, sniffing flowers under

the moonlight.

Story-2: A rabbit hops through the

grass, seeking shelter for the night.

Scene-2

Scene-M

IP-Adapter

Scene-Sharing Attention

Cross Attn

Cross Attn

Scene-1

IP-Adapter

! K

K

Q

V

!

V

V

!

V

! Q

Location

!

K

K

Scene-Sharing Attention

Cross Attn

Cross Attn

……

……

(b) Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention

(a) VLM-Guided Scene Planning

……

……

VLM

Mask-Guided Scene Injection

Mask-Guided Scene Injection

Scene-Sharing

Attention

Story Generation. Owing to the success of diffusion models, many recent works have applied them to story generation, showcasing significant value in real-world applications. Initially, ARLDM[44] uses an auto-regressive paradigm for story generation, while Make-A-Story [45] integrates a visual memory module for aggregation. Subsequently, some researchers attempt to leverage large language models (LLMs) for coherent story generation. For example, StoryGPT-V [46] uses LLMs to resolve ambiguous references and maintain context, while SEED-Story [47] combines image-text data to generate coherent story images. Recently, some works [48, 49, 50] have begun to focus on character consistency in story generation, ensuring that their identity remains intact across diverse text descriptions. Building on this foundation, other studies [5, 14] manipulate attention maps to achieve training-free story generation while maintaining character consistency. However, these methods overlook the planning and consistency of scene contexts in story generation, which also play a fundamental role in visual storytelling. Our work seeks to resolve these problems systematically.

3 Methodology

3.1 Overall Pipeline

In this work, we design a training-free framework called SceneDecorator , to address two key challenges in story generation: scene planning and scene consistency . The overall framework of SceneDecorator is illustrated in Figure 2, which comprises two core techniques: (i) VLM-Guided Scene Planning. Leveraging a powerful Vision-Language Model (VLM) as a director, it decomposes user-provided themes into local scenes and story sub-prompts in a 'global-to-local' manner. (ii) Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention. By simultaneously integrating mask-guided scene injection, scene-sharing attention, and extrapolable noise blending, it maintains subject style diversity and long-term scene consistency in story generation. We elaborate on these in the following sections.

3.2 VLM-Guided Scene Planning

Relying solely on text descriptions to generate story images often lacks scene-level narrative coherence. In real-world applications like filmmaking, a global scene is first established, and then local scenes are derived to unfold different narratives. Inspired by this application, we propose VLM-Guided Scene Planning, which leverages the visual understanding of VLM to unfold scene shots and related narratives in a 'global-to-local' manner. The overall process is decomposed into three core steps: (i) Conceptualizing the Global Scene , (ii) Visualizing the Global Scene , and (iii) Crafting Local Scenes and Sub-prompts . In the following, we elaborate on each stage in detail.

Conceptualizing the Global Scene. We first leverage a powerful VLM to provide a comprehensive global scene description. Specifically, when users provide a theme T , we expect the VLM F θ to fully exploit its scene imagination capability and generate a global scene description Q = F θ ( T ) related to the given theme T . Moreover, we further enhance VLM performance by leveraging its

(a) Scene Injection w/o Mask Guidance

(c) W/o Scene-Sharing Attention

Scene

Scene

(b) Scene Injection w/ Mask Guidance

(d) W/ Scene-Sharing Attention

in-context learning ability. Specifically, we provide illustrative examples to guide the model toward more accurate outputs, with the example details presented in the supplemental material.

Visualizing the Global Scene. Based on the global scene description Q produced by the VLM F θ above, we then employ a powerful off-the-shelf T2I model, like FLUX.1-dev [51], to generate a meaningful global scene image V . In summary, using the complementary capabilities of the VLM and the T2I model, we transform the abstract theme T into an immersive global scene image V . This scene image establishes the global foundation for subsequent local storyline creation.

Crafting Local Scenes and Sub-prompts. Building upon the generated global scene image V above, we further leverage the powerful perception capability of the VLM to intricately create local storylines, which contain relevant local scenes and story sub-prompts. Specifically, we expect the VLM F θ to act as an imaginative director: based on the user-provided theme T , it determines the coordinates {L i } i M =1 for M storyboard scenes within the global scene image V . Then, the global scene image is cropped accordingly to extract final local scenes {V i } i M =1 . This procedure is formulated below:

Finally, for each cropped local scene V i and the corresponding theme T , we employ the VLM F θ to generate N sequential story sub-prompts P 1: N . This process can be formulated as follows:

This scene planning framework transforms the user-provided abstract theme T into multiple local scenes and corresponding story sub-prompts, creating a cohesive narrative that enhances storytelling. The detailed prompts used by the VLM in each step are provided in the supplemental material.

3.3 Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention

Once each local scene {V i } i M =1 is established, it is typically combined with corresponding story sub-prompts P 1: N for subsequent story generation, which is similar to film storyboarding [19]. During generation, we propose Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention to address the challenge of scene consistency that is overlooked in prior work. First, Mask-Guided Scene Injection is developed to preserve the diversity of subject style while achieving scene injection. Next, Scene-Sharing Attention is utilized to maintain scene consistency across multiple stories. Furthermore, this attention mechanism is further extended through Extrapolable Noise Blending to achieve long-term consistency with low memory overhead. The details of these components are described in the following paragraphs.

Mask-Guided Scene Injection. Achieving scene consistency first requires the effective injection of visual semantics from the given scene. One straightforward approach is IP-Adapter [20], which enhances representation by integrating visual and text prompt through a decoupled cross-attention mechanism. However, as shown in Figure 3(a), direct using IP-Adapter for scene injection preserves overall semantics but makes the subjects blend too tightly with the background, which reduces the style diversity across generated stories. To address this issue, we improve IP-Adapter with cross-attention masks to guide fine-grained scene injection, thereby ensuring subject style diversity.

During the cross-attention process, local scene V i and story sub-prompt P j are first encoded into hidden features and then mapped to K ′ c , V ′ c and K c , V c via respective weight matrices. Next, the

Algorithm 1 Extrapolable Noise Blending

̸

latent representation is mapped to Q c and multiplied by K c and K ′ c to generate two attention maps:

where d is the dimension of Q c and K c . A c ∈ R ( hw ) × L represents the cross-attention map between text and generated image, where hw denotes the number of image tokens and L indicates the number of text tokens. A ′ c denotes the cross-attention map between scene and generated image.

At each denoising step, the cross-attention map A c is averaged over all previous steps. The subject token of the sub-prompt P j is then selected, and its activation region in A ′ c is used as the masks M∈ R h × w . Finally, the cross-attention maps A c and A ′ c are multiplied by V c and V ′ c , respectively, and the results are combined through an element-wise weighted sum with the subject masks M :

where λ is a weighting factor that balances scene features and text features. As shown in Figure 3(b), this approach ensures effective scene injection while enhancing the diversity of subject styles.

Scene-Sharing Attention. The above cross-attention mechanism effectively injects scene semantics, achieving scene consistency across generated stories to some extent. However, as shown in Figure 3(c), there is an inherent conflict between story sub-prompts and scene consistency, which significantly weakens coherence across generated stories. To resolve this issue, we extend self-attention with scene-sharing attention to further enhance scene consistency between generated stories.

During the self-attention process, the latent representations from dual-branches are mapped to Q,K,V and ˜ Q, ˜ K, ˜ V through their weight matrices. As depicted in Figure 2(b), each branch then attends to the ˜ K and ˜ V of the other branch for scene interaction, with the masks ˜ M applied to restrict attention to the background. The new key K ′ and new value V ′ are formulated as follows:

where [ ∗ ] represents the concatenation operation and ⊙ denotes element-wise product operation. It is noted that the subject masks M for the other branch are derived using the same method outlined in Mask-Guided Scene Injection and are therefore omitted here for brevity.

Finally, the Q and ˜ Q from each branch will perform attention with the new K ′ and V ′ respectively:

As shown in Figure 3(d), this mechanism allows different stories to attend each other's scene information during the self-attention process, further enhancing scene consistency across stories.

Extrapolable Noise Blending. Although the above method ensures scene consistency across stories, it is limited to generating two stories. We propose an extrapolable noise blending scheme, achieving long-term scene consistency across multiple stories with low overhead, as shown in Algorithm 1.

To simultaneously generate N stories with consistent scenes, we extend the Scene-Sharing Attention module with noise blending during the denoising interval t ∈ [ T 1 , T 2 ] . Specifically, the latent representations { Z i t } N i =1 are dynamically partitioned into complementary pairs < Z i t , Z j t > , with i, j ∈ 1 , ..., N , allowing each story to participate in N -1 pairings per denoising step. The noise predicted for each story in different pairs is then averaged to further update the latent representations. This noise blending strategy enables scene interaction across multiple stories while requiring the GPU memory usage of only two stories, therefore ensuring significantly lower overhead.

4 Experiments

4.1 Experimental Setups

Implementation Details. Weleverage Qwen2-VL [53] as the VLM to guide scene planning, FLUX.1dev [51] as the off-the-shelf T2I model to generate global scenes, and SDXL [54] as the base model to collaborate with the proposed techniques for story generation. Additionally, we employ IP-AdapterXL [20] to support extra scene input. The hyperparameters are set as follows: M = 4 , N = 5 , T 1 = 0 , and T 2 = 25 . SceneDecorator can run on a single RTX 3090 GPU without further training.

Baselines and Datasets. Since our work is the first to focus on scene-oriented story generation, there are no directly related comparison methods. Therefore, we select and adapt three baselines: CustomDiffusion [52], ConsiStory [5], and StoryDiffusion [14], due to their competitive performance on similar tasks. To validate the effectiveness of SceneDecorator, we use GPT-4o [55] to randomly generate 146 themes across different domains. Each theme is then decomposed into 4 distinct local scenes by the VLM, with each scene containing 5 story sub-prompts. In total, there are 2,920 scene-prompt pairs that serve as input for each method, ensuring a fair comparison.

4.2 Quantitative Comparisons

We validate the superiority of our SceneDecorator from two perspectives: Automatic Metrics that provide an objective assessment, and User Study that offers a subjective evaluation.

Automatic Metrics. We evaluate the quality of the generated stories from three dimensions: (i) CLIP-T [56], which assesses the alignment between the generated stories and the input prompt, (ii) DreamSim-I [57], which measures the alignment between the generated stories and the input scene, and (iii) DINO-F [58], which evaluates the scene consistency across generated stories. The detailed results are reported in Table 1. SceneDecorator outperforms all other methods in both the DreamSim-I and DINO-F metrics, with ConsiStory [5] ranking second. This indicates that our method achieves the best performance in scene alignment and consistency. In the CLIP-T metric, our SceneDecorator ranks

Story-1

Story-2

Story-4

Story-3

The girl listens to the

symphony of nature,

feeling at peace.

Ours

CustomDiffusion

StoryDiffusion

Consistory

A turtle slowly emerges

from the water,

exploring the shore.

A raccoon wades into

the stream, cooling off

from the warm night.

A firefly hovers above

the water,

illuminating the path.

Story-4

Story-3

A mouse scuttles

along the ground,

searching for food.

A hedgehog curls

up in the grass,

sleeping soundly.

A frog croaks from the

edge of the stream,

serenading the night.

A bee rests on a flower,

exhausted from a day

of pollination.

Story-1

Story-2

Decorate

Decorate

Scene 1

Scene 2

second, slightly behind ConsiStory. Overall, SceneDecorator demonstrates superior performance across these metrics, showing its effectiveness in scene-oriented story generation.

User Study. We designed a questionnaire with 13 groups of generated results, where each group contains four different stories. Questionnaires are randomly distributed to participants from diverse countries, cultural backgrounds, genders, and age groups, inviting them to select the best result from each group based on three key aspects: text alignment , scene alignment , and image quality . Ultimately, we have received 61 valid responses, with the detailed results illustrated in Table 1. Our SceneDecorator achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three aspects, demonstrating particularly significant gaps in scene alignment. This success can be attributed to our innovative VLMGuided Scene Planning strategy and the advanced Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention mechanism.

4.3 Qualitative Comparisons

In addition, we conduct qualitative comparisons of the proposed SceneDecorator with three existing approaches, including CustomDiffusion [52], StoryDiffusion [14], and ConsiStory [5]. The visualization results are presented in Figure 4, and additional results can be found in the supplementary material. CustomDiffusion, which is designed for personalized characters, faces challenges in generating personalized scenes. Similarly, StoryDiffusion, which is focused on consistent character story generation, struggles to maintain scene consistency across different stories. On the other hand, Consistory demonstrates strong performance in preserving scene consistency but encounters difficulties in effectively capturing the full scope of scene information, limiting its versatility. In contrast, our SceneDecorator efficiently capture detailed semantics of the scene while ensuring scene consistency across generated stories, showcasing its superiority in scene-oriented story generation.

4.4 Ablation Studies

In this section, we explore the effectiveness of the three proposed components: Mask-Guided Scene Injection , Scene-Sharing Attention , and Extrapolable Noise Blending , individually.

Mask-Guided Scene Injection. We compare the generation results with and without the mask-guided scene injection module, with qualitative examples shown in Figure 5. Without mask-guided scene injection, textual descriptions alone fail to generate stories that contain specific scene semantics. In contrast, incorporating mask-guided scene injection provides fine-grained guidance, which not only facilitates the injection of scene semantics but also preserves diversity in subject styles.

Scene-Sharing

Attention

Mask-Guided

Scene Injection

Story-1:  A girl watches

the stars swirl above a

quiet meadow.

Story-2:  A bird perches

on a flower, gazing at

the starry sky.

Story-3:  A man finds

solace in the tranquil

night by the tower.

Story-4:  A fox explores

the meadow under the

watchful moon.

Story-5:  A child dreams

of flying among the

swirling stars.

Scene

×

√

×

×

√

√

Story-1

Story-2

Story-3

Story-4

Story-5

Story-6

Story-7

Story-8

Story-9

W/o Extrap.

Scene-Sharing Attention. Moreover, the effectiveness of the scene-sharing attention mechanism is also demonstrated in Figure,5, where its impact on maintaining narrative coherence is clearly illustrated. By leveraging this proposed attention mechanism, the model is able to enhance scene consistency across different generated stories, ensuring that key contextual elements remain fully aligned and logically connected throughout the narrative. When combined with the scene injection strategy, this synergy not only ensures that subject diversity is effectively integrated into the storytelling process but also reinforces scene consistency across different generated stories.

Extrapolable Noise Blending. Finally, we assess the effectiveness of extrapolable noise blending in generating stories that preserve long-term scene consistency, with the associated experiments performed on a single RTX 3090 GPU. The visualization result is illustrated in Figure 6 and the memory usage is reported in Table 2. Although scene consistency can be partially maintained without extrapolable noise blending, the associated memory usage scales with the number of story images and often causes out-of-memory (OOM) errors. In contrast, applying extrapolable noise blending fixes memory usage, effectively preventing 'OOM' issues while ensuring long-term scene consistency.

The man explores the

misty mountains,

seeking lost

knowledge

A bird soars high

above, searching for

food in the vast

desert expanse.

A seal pup plays on

the ice floes,

learning to

navigate the frozen

sea.

An old scholar

discovers an ancient

book between the

shelves, its whispers

guiding him.

The old scholar

approaches the desk,

where an eerie light

casts strange

shadows.

The lights flicker,

and the old scholar

uncovers a hidden

passage, beckoning

him forward.

①

②

③

①

①

②

②

③

③

①

②

③

Scene

Generated Image

Scene

Generated Image

4.5 Rationality Analysis of VLM-Guided Scene Planning

We further analyze the local scenes partitioned by the VLM-Guided Scene Planning strategy from two perspectives: Coordinate Rationality and Semantic Rationality , as detailed below.

Coordinate Rationality. When partitioning the global scene image (Equation 1), the coordinates predicted by the VLM may occasionally fall slightly outside the defined image boundaries. To robustly address this issue, we apply a simple yet effective correction: invalid coordinates are automatically snapped to the nearest valid bounding box, thereby ensuring all generated coordinates remain usable.

Semantic Rationality. To assess the semantic rationality of the partitioned local scenes, we conducted a quantitative evaluation using GPT4o [55]. For each sample, the story theme, the global scene, the derived local scenes, and the corresponding story sub-prompts are provided to GPT-4o, which is instructed to evaluate them along three key criteria: Narrative Coherence ,

Theme Adherence , and Layout Reasonableness . Each criterion was scored on a 10-level scale (0-100%), with the details illustrated in Table 3. The results show that VLM-Guided Scene Planning exhibits strong robustness across narrative coherence, theme adherence, and layout reasonableness.

5 More Applications

Generation with Manual Scene Input. In addition to automatic VLM-Guided Scene Planning, our SceneDecorator can also support manual scene input. Specifically, users can provide a global scene, manually divide it into local scenes, and use them for subsequent story generation. As illustrated in Figure 7, the impressive visual results further emphasize the scalability of SceneDecorator.

Generation with Consistent Character. Beyond generating stories with scene consistency, SceneDecorator can also generate stories that preserve character consistency under different scenes. Specifically, we modify the scene-sharing attention by inverting the mask to ensure character consistency, while keeping the mask-guided scene injection unchanged. In Figure 7, the same character experiences different stories across scenes, further showcasing the flexibility of SceneDecorator.

Generation with Other Tools. As a training-free framework, SceneDecorator can also seamlessly integrate with other generative tools to meet diverse user needs. Detailed examples are demonstrated in Figure 8. It can be combined with PhotoMaker [59] for customized character generation and with ControlNet [25] for precise conditional control. Furthermore, it can work effectively with stylized LoRAs [60] to achieve diverse style generation. In summary, by incorporating diverse generative tools, our proposed SceneDecorator highlights more creative and flexible workflows.

The scholar

follows the light

beams, guided to a

hidden secret.

Scene-1

Scene-2

The scholar

reads a letter in an

ancient room.

The scholar

finds a glowing

object hidden on

the table.

The man steps on

a crack in the

floor, glimpsing

another time.

The girl reads a

book, watching

history rewrite

itself around them.

The girl finds a

forgotten

manuscript, its

pages glowing in

the candlelight.

A scholar stands

in a dim library.

The scholar senses

an overwhelming

discovery.

The scholar stands

near an old table.

Scene-3

Stylized LoRAs

PhotoMaker

ControlNet

Scene

Stories

一

一

一

Generation with Evolving Scenes. In addition, SceneDecorator provides robust support for generating multiple stories with evolving scenes, such as changes in the time of day or shifts in seasons, which further showcases its flexibility and adaptability. As illustrated in Figure 9, the model is capable of dynamically adapting to a wide range of scene inputs, enabling the generation of diverse stories that evolve seamlessly across different contexts. SceneDecorator empowers users to flexibly craft immersive and dynamic stories that capture the essence of change across diverse settings.

6 Conclusion

This paper introduces SceneDecorator , a training-free framework for scene-oriented story generation . It emphasizes scene planning and scene consistency, in contrast to the character consistency focus of prior works. Our SceneDecorator comprises two core techniques: (i) VLM-Guided Scene Planning , which decomposes user-provided themes into local scenes and story sub-prompts in a 'global-to-local' manner, and (ii) Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention , which integrates mask-guided scene injection, scene-sharing attention, and extrapolable noise blending to maintain subject style diversity and long-term scene consistency during generation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of SceneDecorator, showcasing its ability to enhance creativity across real-world applications.

Acknowledgments. This work was supported by the InnoHK initiative of the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government via the Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics, by the Faculty Initiatives Research of Monash University (Contract No. 2901912), by the NVIDIA Academic Hardware Grant Program, and by the Research Start-up Fund for Prof. Xiaowei Hu at the Guangzhou International Campus, South China University of Technology (Grant No. K3250310).

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A Implementation Details about Baselines

CustomDiffusion is a tuning-based method that requires fine-tuning to inject given visual concepts. Specifically, we fine-tune it using the local scene images obtained from our VLM-guided scene planning framework. During inference, we adopt the corresponding story sub-prompts together with the fine-tuned model to enable a fair comparison.

StoryDiffusion is a training-free method designed for subject-consistent story generation and naturally supports image conditioning. We directly use the local scene images and the associated story sub-prompts from the VLM-guided scene planning framework as input.

ConsiStory is also a training-free method for subject-consistent story generation. However, the official implementation does not support images as input. For a meaningful comparison, we make minimal modifications to adapt it to our task, prepending the local scene images to the input batch and leveraging it as a reference through self-attention and feature infusion mechanisms. Additionally, the same story sub-prompts are also adopted accordingly.

B Implementation Details about VLM-Guided Scene Planning

We propose VLM-Guided Scene Planning to guide the VLM in decomposing the user-provided theme into multiple local scenes and stories with specific instructions. The VLM is leveraged in two step, including conceptualizing the global scene and crafting local scenes and sub-prompts .

Conceptualizing the Global Scene. The complete prompt for conceptualizing the global scene consists of two main components, which are also detailed in Table 4.

Instruction: This specifies the task and defines the specific theme from the user prompt, helping the VLM perform effectively in global scene generation tasks. It provides a structured way to guide the model in synthesizing scenes and storylines.

Examples: This is an example that shows how the VLM works. The user prompt is filled into the provided system instruction. The model then continues the conversation based on the user prompt and provides the scene description in the specified format.

Crafting Local Scenes and Sub-prompts. Complete prompt for crafting local scenes also includes two main components, which are also detailed in Table 5.

Instruction: The model is required to select four distinct local scenes (sub-scenes) from an image, ensuring minimal overlap, and providing the coordinates for each local scene. Subsequently, we mandate the creation of five unique stories for each local scene, focusing on a protagonist's experience, summarized in one sentence. The protagonist can be an animal or a human with generic pronouns. The instruction emphasizes creativity and coherence,

ensuring captivating narratives while maintaining uniqueness. The output should include the coordinates of local scenes and the corresponding story sub-prompts for local scenes.

Examples: There is also an example that shows how to craft local scenes. The user needs to provide the generated global image, the VLM then continues the conversation based on the user prompt and provides the sub-scene description as required.

C Limitations and Future Work

Our SceneDecorator is tailored for scene planning and ensuring consistency, showcasing notable advantages compared to existing methods. Nonetheless, several limitations remain: (i) As a trainingfree method, the story generation capability of SceneDecorator largely depends on the underlying foundation models, such as FLUX.1, SDXL, and Qwen2-VL. Consequently, any limitations inherent in these base models can constrain the overall performance of SceneDecorator. (ii) For scene injection, we adopt the IP-Adapter technique, which proves effective in general. However, it performs less reliably in out-of-distribution scenarios, such as depicting an elephant in the sky.

Regarding the first limitation, future work could explore more complex scene-oriented story generation tasks, such as scene transitions and multi-scene integration. As for the second limitation, developing more effective scene control mechanisms beyond the current reliance on IP-Adapter would be a promising direction.

D Potential Negative Societal Impact

Our work is primarily designed for scene-oriented story generation within the broader domains of visual content creation. However, we explicitly acknowledge that technologies capable of generating multi-image narratives may also pose significant societal risks if misused. In particular:

Disinformation and Propaganda. The ability to generate visual narratives could be exploited to fabricate persuasive but false stories, amplifying the spread of disinformation.

Bias and Stereotypes. Unintended biases present in the input story themes could potentially reinforce harmful cultural stereotypes or discriminatory visual representations.

Inappropriate or harmful content. Without proper safeguards and regulatory oversight, the generated content might unintentionally include sensitive, violent, or inappropriate material, potentially causing psychological or emotional harm to diverse audiences.

We highlight these important concerns to encourage the responsible and ethical use of our method and emphasize the importance of developing safeguards against potential misuse.

E Additional Results

To further validate the effectiveness and versatility of SceneDecorator, we present additional qualitative comparisons in Figure 10 and Figure 11. These examples highlight the model's ability to generate coherent and contextually appropriate scenes across diverse prompts and settings.

A girl meditates on the

shore, feeling the cool

water beneath her

ConsiStory

StoryDiffusion

CustomDiffusion

Ours

A bird perches on a

branch, singing as

leaves flutter around

The girl picks

wildflowers, creating a

bouquet in the

moonlight

A mermaid searches for

clues, hoping to uncover

the ruins' secrets

A man takes a

leisurely stroll,

enjoying the tranquil

beach atmosphere

ConsiStory

StoryDiffusion

CustomDiffusion

Ours

The man climbs the

rocky walls, searching

for a secret passage

A man lies on the grass,

counting the stars above

A group of travelers

gather at the ruins,

sharing stories

The girl listens to the

soothing sound of the

stream, feeling calm

ConsiStory

StoryDiffusion

CustomDiffusion

Ours

A bird discovers a new

melody, inspired by the

surrounding flowers

A fairy dances among

the crystals, casting

colorful shadows

A bear forages for food,

feeling the presence of

ancient spirits

Peer reviews:
comments: SUMMARY:
This paper proposes SceneDecorator, which can decorate a patch of the input image with story prompts generated by VLM and output the decorated images with additional contents. The method leverages diffusion models with masks for the generation. The experiment has qualitative and quantitative results, which try to prove the effectiveness of this proposed method.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES:
Strengths:
1. the paper is well written and easy to follow.
2. the evaluation is complete with qualititative metrics (automatic and human based), quantitative images, ablation study, and memory efficiency analysis.

Weaknesses:
the main concern is that, the paper claims as a scene decorator, but the generation results are so different in terms of the background. It somehow totally change the background sturcture and does a re-creation from the input patches. My point is that, the generation consistency is not that good. and it's caused by the method design.

QUESTIONS:
If the authors could answer my question in the weaknesses section, and solve the generation consistency problem, and ensure that it's truly a decoration, not a re-creation, I would raise my points to positive.

LIMITATIONS:
yes
TITLE: Official Review
CLARITY: 2
IMPACT: 2
ORIGINALITY: 2
DATE: 2025-06-12

comments: SUMMARY:
The paper introduces SceneDecorator, a novel training-free framework for scene-oriented story generation that addresses two key challenges: (i) scene planning to ensure narrative coherence across scenes, and (ii) scene consistency to maintain coherence across multiple storylines. Unlike existing methods that focus primarily on character consistency, SceneDecorator leverages a VLM-Guided Scene Planning strategy to decompose user-provided themes into globally coherent scenes and local sub-scenes in a "global-to-local" manner. Additionally, it employs a Long-Term Scene-Sharing Attention mechanism to preserve scene consistency while allowing subject style diversity. The framework demonstrates superior performance in qualitative and quantitative evaluations, with applications in creative domains like film and game design.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES:
### Strength

1. The technical approach is rigorous, combining VLMs (Qwen2-VL) and diffusion models (SDXL) innovatively. The proposed Scene-Sharing Attention and Extrapolable Noise Blending are well-designed to address long-term consistency with low computational overhead (Table 2).
2. The paper is well-structured, with clear motivations (e.g., limitations of independent scene generation in §1) and method descriptions (e.g., Figure 2 illustrates the pipeline effectively).
3. Addresses an underexplored problem (scene consistency in storytelling) with practical applications in film storyboarding and game design (§5).

### Weakness

1. Performance is bounded by the capabilities of FLUX.1-dev and Qwen2-VL
2. The evaluation relies on 32 users which may not capture diverse cultural interpretations of scene coherence.

QUESTIONS:
None

LIMITATIONS:
yes
TITLE: Official Review
CLARITY: 4
IMPACT: 4
ORIGINALITY: 3
DATE: 2025-06-14

comments: SUMMARY:
The paper introduces a training-free framework, scenedecorator, that aims to impose coherence in scenes, with subject style diversity across different stories; essentially a scene-oriented story generation instead of character-oriented story generation widely available in the literature.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES:
Scene centric story generation and scene consistencies across subject diversity - these two aspects are the focus of the work. The authors propose to perform mask-guided scene injection and scene-sharing attentions to achieve the above mentioned goals. The qualitative examples help grasp the idea behind the work easily. 
This is an interesting and possibly useful tool for content creators.

QUESTIONS:
What do the authors think about extending from scene-oriented story generation to scene-oriented movie generation? What would be the challenges and technical problems to solve?

LIMITATIONS:
Not exactly a limitation of this work, but my question would be about the next steps. From story to animation movie generation!
TITLE: Official Review
CLARITY: 3
IMPACT: 2
ORIGINALITY: 3
DATE: 2025-07-01

{"IS_META_REVIEW": false, "comments": "SUMMARY:\nSceneDecorator is a training-free framework designed for scene-oriented story generation, aiming to maintain visual consistency across a series of images. It addresses the limitations of existing methods that the paper claims often focus on character consistency while neglecting the role of scenes in storytelling\n\nSTRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES:\nStrengths: \n1. The Problem story consistency is a genuine problem, and the authors focus on scenes instead of just characters is a valid angle. \n2. The qualitative results in the figures are undeniably attractive.\n3. The core idea of using a powerful VLM to do the \"thinking\"—planning the global scene, then dicing it up into local scenes and storylines—is a pragmatic engineering choice\n\nWeaknesses：\n1. The “VLM-Guided Scene Planning” module is described as the core novelty of the pipeline. However, it appears to be primarily a well-crafted prompting mechanism applied to a powerful pretrained VLM (Qwen2-VL), with little algorithmic innovation. The formulation (e.g., Q = Fₜ(T)) may overstate the underlying complexity.\n2. The entire \"global-to-local\" pipeline is built on a fatal assumption: that a story's scenes are just different crops of a single, static master image. This is a profound limitation. This framework is incapable of depicting scenes that evolve or change over time, which is a core element of countless narratives.\n\nQUESTIONS:\n1. Could authors please provide a precise description of the modifications made to each baseline (CustomDiffusion, ConsiStory, and StoryDiffusion)?\n2. How robust is the VLM planning stage? What is the approximate failure rate (e.g., instances where the VLM provided unusable coordinates, nonsensical storylines, or failed to adhere to the theme)?\n3. Can \"SceneDecorator\" be called as   Scene-Oriented Story Generation in light of its inability to handle stories with scenes that evolve or change over time (e.g., a landscape changing from day to night, a location being altered by character actions)?\n\nLIMITATIONS:\nThe authors have not adequately addressed the potential negative societal impact of their work. In the NeurIPS Paper Checklist, when asked if the paper discusses potential positive and negative societal impacts, the authors answered \"[NA]\" (Not Applicable). However, this dismissal is inadequate. A tool that improves the generation of consistent, multi-image narratives could be used to create more convincing and coherent disinformation or propaganda.", "TITLE": "Official Review", "RECOMMENDATION": 5, "REVIEWER_CONFIDENCE": 4, "CLARITY": 2, "IMPACT": 3, "ORIGINALITY": 2, "DATE": "2025-07-03"}