InstructionCrafter: Generating Consistent and High-Fidelity Visual Instructions

Abstract

Given textual task instructions, generating step-by-step visual instructions as an image sequence requires the simultaneous satisfaction of multiple properties, specifically step faithfulness, cross-image consistency, and per-frame visual quality. Existing text-to-image generation approaches rarely meet all three properties, owing to independent sampling that breaks consistency, finetuning on low-quality video that degrades per-frame quality, and frozen backbones that lack multi-step understanding. In this work, we propose InstructionCrafter, a diffusion-based framework with the key idea of separating the optimization of temporal and instructional alignment from per-frame visual quality via (1) spatial-freeze training and (2) instruction-aware adapters. Built on a pretrained video diffusion backbone, InstructionCrafter freezes the spatial layers that control per-frame detail and updates only temporal and text-conditioning pathways to learn instruction semantics and inter-step relations, which preserves the generative prior for per-frame quality and reduces trainable parameters by about 50 percent compared with full finetuning. We also introduce two lightweight adapters that enhance the model's understanding of instructional context. The Consistent Adapter aggregates textual cues from the entire instruction sequence and from neighboring steps to keep object identity and attributes consistent across frames, and the Context-Aware Temporal Adapter converts cross-attention outputs into biases for temporal self-attention, explicitly propagating inter-frame relations. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art overall performance on step faithfulness, cross-image consistency, and per-frame visual quality while significantly reducing noise, blur, and spurious subtitles. Our code and trained models will be publicly available.