ContextAnyone: Context-Aware Diffusion for Character-Consistent Text-to-Video Generation

Abstract

Text-to-video generation has advanced rapidly, yet preserving a character's holistic appearance from a single reference image remains challenging, particularly when the character undergoes large pose, motion, and scene changes. Existing reference-conditioned approaches primarily treat the reference image as a conditioning signal, which can weaken fine-grained appearance information as reference and noisy video tokens interact during denoising. We propose \textbf{ContextAnyone}, a context-aware diffusion framework that instead treats the reference as an explicitly preserved appearance anchor. Our key idea is to jointly reconstruct the reference image and generate the target video within a shared diffusion transformer, providing direct supervision for preserving identity and fine-grained appearance throughout denoising. To maintain the reference as a stable source of appearance information, we further introduce asymmetric information flow that allows video tokens to selectively access reference tokens while preventing noisy video features from propagating back to the reference branch. We complement this design with Gap-RoPE, which separates the positional representations of the reference and generated video tokens. Experiments on a benchmark constructed from OpenVid-HD demonstrate that ContextAnyone improves both identity and fine-grained appearance consistency over existing reference-conditioned baselines while maintaining motion characteristics close to the underlying text-to-video generator.