Visual storytelling requires generating images that follow a narrative while preserving consistent character identities across frames. In free-form story generation, a character is fully described only when first introduced and is later referred to by a type-level mention or pronoun. Although this setting better reflects natural storytelling, later prompts may omit important identity-related semantics, making character consistency more difficult to maintain. We propose \textbf{Sidecar}, a plug-and-play semantic augmentation module that preserves entity-level information from the initial description and injects the missing semantics into later prompt embeddings. Sidecar requires no additional training and does not modify the architecture of the base diffusion model. Experiments on FreeStoryBench show that Sidecar consistently improves prompt-image alignment and character consistency across multiple SDXL- and FLUX-based baselines, with negligible computational overhead.
Visual storytelling aims to generate image sequences that are both aligned with narrative prompts and consistent in character appearance across images. Recent training-free methods improve character consistency by reusing attention features, but rely on structured prompts where full character descriptions are repeated in every prompt. This assumption simplifies the task but deviates from natural storytelling, where characters are typically introduced once and later referred to using pronouns or type-based expressions. We propose \textbf{FreeStory}, a training-free framework that reformulates character consistency under free-form prompts as entity-grounded feature reuse. Our method associates reference mentions with their corresponding character descriptions and combines dynamic character masks, correspondence-aware feature matching, key-value injection, and query blending to preserve identity while retaining generation diversity. We also introduce \textbf{FreeStoryBench}, a benchmark for this setting that includes both single- and multi-character stories. Experiments show that FreeStory achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free methods on structured benchmarks and stronger overall consistency over baselines under free-form prompts.
Visual storytelling with diffusion models has made impressive strides in maintaining character consistency across narrative scenes. However, a critical gap remains: while these methods ensure a character remains consistent across scenes, they provide no systematic method to ensure if fine-grained attributes such as color and textures of clothing, accessories are faithfully rendered in the generated images. Towards this goal, we introduce AttriStory, a benchmark enabling attribute realization in visual storytelling. We curate 200 multi-scene stories across 10 distinct artistic styles using Large Language Model. Each scene is constructed with detailed attribute specifications to enable rich visual narratives. Further, to address attribute realization, we propose a plug-and-play latent optimization module that operates during early denoising steps, when the model establishes structural and semantic content. We achieve this through AttriLoss objective designed to maximize alignment between the cross-attention maps for desired attribute-object pairs while suppressing spurious associations, guiding models to localize attributes correctly. This approach operates orthogonally to existing consistency mechanisms, integrating seamlessly with current story generation pipelines without requiring architectural modifications. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements on incorporating AttriLoss across all baselines. This work positions attribute realization as a distinct, complementary dimension of visual storytelling, alongside character consistency, advancing the field toward fine-grained attribute-controlled story generation. Project-page:https://manogna-s.github.io/attristory/