  Recent advances in image and video creation, especially AI-based image
synthesis, have led to the production of numerous visual scenes that exhibit a
high level of abstractness and diversity. Consequently, Visual Storytelling
(VST), a task that involves generating meaningful and coherent narratives from
a collection of images, has become even more challenging and is increasingly
desired beyond real-world imagery. While existing VST techniques, which
typically use autoregressive decoders, have made significant progress, they
suffer from low inference speed and are not well-suited for synthetic scenes.
To this end, we propose a novel diffusion-based system DiffuVST, which models
the generation of a series of visual descriptions as a single conditional
denoising process. The stochastic and non-autoregressive nature of DiffuVST at
inference time allows it to generate highly diverse narratives more
efficiently. In addition, DiffuVST features a unique design with bi-directional
text history guidance and multimodal adapter modules, which effectively improve
inter-sentence coherence and image-to-text fidelity. Extensive experiments on
the story generation task covering four fictional visual-story datasets
demonstrate the superiority of DiffuVST over traditional autoregressive models
in terms of both text quality and inference speed.
