Chronos: Sequential Identity-Preserving Video Generation by Temporal Anchoring

Mengqi Huang, Wenchuan Wang, Zhendong Mao, Yijing Tu, Zhike Liu +6

Identity-preserving video generation aims to synthesize high-quality and visually realistic videos from textual and visual conditions while faithfully maintaining the subject's identity across diverse motions. Prior methods have extensively introduced reference-guided control signals and identity-aware conditioning to improve facial alignment from reference images. However, improving static identity alignment alone creates a fundamental tension between identity fidelity and temporal controllability, which frequently causes identity drift or motion suppression under large pose variations and multi-segment sequential actions. To address this, we propose Chronos, a framework that unifies single-segment facial identity preservation and multi-segment sequential action generation under a common temporal formulation. Specifically, Chronos integrates Semantic Prompt Anchoring to adaptively refine the user prompt, Visual Frame Anchoring to transform conditions into visually grounded keyframe anchors for visual guidance, and Metric-Guided Candidate Routing to select the highest-quality videos from heterogeneous generators via multi-dimensional evaluation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate…