arXiv AI

NarrativeWorldBench: A Frontier-Saturated Benchmark and a Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Co-Creative Audio Drama

arXiv:2606. 17391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-form serialized audio drama, with arcs that run for 200 to 800 episodes, is a major creative medium and a setting where frontier large language models (LLMs) fail.

arXiv AI
Jul 22

PlotTwist: A Creative Plot Generation Framework with Small Language Models

arXiv:2603. 16410v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Creative plot generation presents a fundamental challenge for language models: transforming a concise premise into a coherent narrative that sustains global coherence, character development, pacing, tone consistency, and emotional progression.

By Abhinav Thorat, Ravi Kolla, Jyotin Goel, Madhav Kataria, Niranjan Pedanekar
arXiv AI
Jul 8

Narrative World Model: Narratology-Grounded Writer Memory for Long-Form Fiction

arXiv:2607. 05577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-form fiction writers need memory that answers multi-hop questions about evolving story state: who knows a secret and when they learned it, whether an event preceded the narration that revealed it, whether a setup paid off, and how a relationship shifted.

By Mohammad Saifullah, Thomas Kornmaier, Taaha Kazi, Vasu Sharma, Aditya Sanjiv Kanade, Aanand Kumar Yadav
arXiv AI
Jun 4

POLARIS: Guiding Small Models to Write Long Stories

arXiv:2606. 04095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small open-weight models struggle at long-form creative writing: their generated stories either fall far short of the requested length, or their quality significantly degrades as length increases, especially when compared to frontier models.

By Rishanth Rajendhran, Jenna Russell, Mohit Iyyer, John Frederick Wieting
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

How LLMs Build Fictional Worlds: Setting and Narrative Space in AI-Generated Creative Storytelling

The paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) construct fictional worlds, specifically examining setting as a measurable aspect of storyworld creation. By generating 1,000 AI stories per model in English and German and comparing them to human-authored fiction from Project Gutenberg, the authors classify narrative space into five categories—action, perceived, visual, descriptive, and no space—using fine‑tuned BERT classifiers. Results show that human texts mainly use action space, grounding narratives in character-environment interaction, while LLMs consistently overproduce perceived space, focusing on atmosphere and affect, with this pattern varying by model and language.

By Katrin Rohrbacher, Bj\"orn Nieth, Emmanuelle Salin, Bjoern Eskofier, Michaela Mahlberg
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

The paper presents a detailed examination of narrative elements—agency, setting, and events—within the Dolma web-scale pretraining corpus. Using a framework of 11 interpretable dimensions, the authors hand‑annotated 400 passages, expanded this to a 25,000‑passage LLM‑labeled dataset, and trained NarraBERT models to predict narrative features across 13 million passages, producing the NarraDolma dataset. The study reveals that narrative structure is measurable at scale and that narrative qualities vary unevenly across different data sources, topics, and formats, highlighting gaps in current data curation practices.

By Teagan Johnson, Elliott Ash, Andrew Piper, Maria Antoniak