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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

SAX: Advancing Video Diffusion Models for Sequential Action Execution

Haoyu Wang, Baorui Ma, Donglin Di, Shiliang Zhang

Abstract

Video diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable visual fidelity. However, when handling complex instructions with multi-action sequential prompts, existing models frequently suffer from severe action omission or state freezing. We attribute this bottleneck to two fundamental flaws: i) semantic entanglement, where appearance and motion concepts are heavily intertwined within the text embedding space; and ii) temporal attention leakage, wherein the global nature of cross-attention along the temporal dimension biases the model towards the most visually salient action tokens throughout the entire video. To break this bottleneck, we propose SAX, a novel diffusion transformer framework designed for the synergistic generation of appearance and dynamic actions. First, we introduce a dual-stream attention mechanism that explicitly decouples dynamic action interactions from the static appearance generation process. Besides, to establish a precise temporal-action mapping, we design the Layer-adaptive Action Choreographer. By integrating a shared Global Temporal Table and an Action Ordinal Table, this module dynamically generates a temporal-action alignment map for each layer. Furthermore, to overcome the implicit convergence difficulties inherent in temporal-action alignment optimization, we innovatively employ a Vision-Language Model as a temporal-semantic supervisor. Through distribution distillation, we directly inject the VLM's powerful temporal-action grounding priors into the learning of the alignment maps. Extensive experiments on action generation and prediction demonstrate that SAX substantially outperforms existing models across core metrics.

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