Complementary Retrieval-Augmented Prompting for Consistent Long-Form Video Generation

Xianghan Wei, Xiaoda Yang, Zhi Wang, An Pan, Daoan Zhang +5

While recent video foundation models excel at generating high-quality short videos, long-form video generation remains a critical challenge, where a major bottleneck lies in conditioning independently generated shots to preserve consistent characters, scenes, and objects throughout a story. Existing training-free approaches typically condition target shots using retrieved historical visuals. However, these references often suffer from severe informational mismatch, either introducing irrelevant contextual redundancy or failing to provide the full combination of required elements for the target shot. To resolve this, we present Complementary Retrieval-Augmented Prompting, an agentic framework that strategically aggregates a compact set of mutually supportive historical references to achieve complete and targeted conditioning for long-form video generation without retraining or modifying the underlying generator. Specifically, our framework explicitly models the visual elements required by each target shot by parsing the narrative script into a text-grounded visual element registry that tracks characters, objects, scenes, and their shot-level states. A VLM-annotated keyframe…