Bridging Your Imagination with Audio-Video Generation via a Unified Director
Jiaxu Zhang, Tianshu Hu, Yuan Zhang, Zenan Li, Linjie Luo, Mingyuan Gao, Guosheng Lin, Xin Chen
Abstract
Existing AI-driven video creation systems typically treat script drafting and key-shot design as two disjoint tasks: the former relies on large language models, while the latter depends on image generation models. We argue that these two tasks should be unified within a single framework, as logical reasoning and imaginative thinking are both fundamental qualities of a film director. In this work, we propose **UniMAGE**, a unified director model that bridges user prompts with well-structured scripts, thereby empowering non-experts to produce long-context, multi-shot films by leveraging existing audio–video generation models. To achieve this, we employ the Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that unifies text and image generation. To further enhance narrative logic and keyframe consistency, we introduce a ``first interleaving, then disentangling" training paradigm. Specifically, we first perform **Interleaved Concept Learning**, which utilizes interleaved text–image data to foster the model’s deeper understanding and imaginative interpretation of scripts. We then conduct **Disentangled Expert Learning**, which decouples script writing from keyframe generation, enabling greater flexibility and creativity in storytelling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniMAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models, generating logically coherent scripts and visually consistent keyframe images.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
zhang2026bridging,
title={Bridging Your Imagination with Audio-Video Generation via a Unified Director},
author={Jiaxu Zhang and Tianshu Hu and Yuan Zhang and Zenan Li and Linjie Luo and Mingyuan Gao and Guosheng Lin and Xin Chen},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=FHMsceUzfS}
}