ICML 2026poster0 citations

AlignVid: Taming Visual Dominance via Training-Free Attention Modulation in Text-guided Image-to-Video Generation

Yexin Liu, Wenjie Shu, Zile Huang, Haoze Zheng, Yueze Wang, Manyuan Zhang, Jinjing Zhu, Ser-Nam Lim

Abstract

Text-guided image-to-video generation has made substantial progress, yet it still struggles to execute text-specified edits that require substantial changes to a reference image (e.g., object addition, deletion, or modification). Empirically, our analysis reveals that this stems from **visual dominance**, where the reference image causes severe attention dispersion, inhibiting the model's ability to incorporate new semantic information. To address this, we propose **AlignVid**, a training-free intervention that re-calibrates the model's internal attention distribution. Drawing on an energy-based perspective of attention, AlignVid employs Attention Scaling Modulation (**ASM**) to reduce attention entropy and concentrate focus on semantic tokens, alongside Guidance Scheduling (**GS**) to maintain generation stability. To rigorously assess this capability, we present **OmitI2V**, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating prompt adherence across object addition, deletion, and modification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlignVid effectively enhances semantic fidelity with negligible computational overhead.

TransformerVisionBenchmark
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
liu2026alignvid,
title={AlignVid: Taming Visual Dominance via Training-Free Attention Modulation in Text-guided Image-to-Video Generation},
author={Yexin Liu and Wen-Jie Shu and Zile Huang and Haoze Zheng and Yueze Wang and Manyuan Zhang and Jinjing Zhu and Ser-Nam Lim and Harry Yang},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=bgtUrDtKjF}
}