Chronos: Sequential Identity-Preserving Video Generation by Temporal Anchoring

arXiv:2611.05893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 the superiority of our approach, which achieved first place in both Track 1 and Track 2 of the ACM MM 2026 Identity-Preserving Video Generation Challenge, demonstrating its effectiveness across both facial identity preservation and sequential action generation settings.