Text Generation

Momentum

33 papers in the last four weeks, up 175% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 265

Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

GLARE: Generative Learning via Adversarial Reward Estimation For Social Dynamics Forecasting

Meeting continuation requires tracking the agenda, speaker roles, participant intentions, and disagreement across long multi-party discussions. We introduce the Meeting Dynamic Forecasting Benchmark (MDFB), constructed from 2,207 real-world meetings and 24,794 future-facing queries. Given a transcript prefix and an active question, a model generates a plausible multi-turn continuation in one call. We evaluate utility---progress toward the question---and human-likeness---plausible conversational flow and role consistency---without requiring exact reproduction of the observed future. We further present GLARE, an adaptation of adversarial imitation learning to conditional language generation. A discriminator ranks the observed continuation above samples from the current actor, and its score supplies a KL-regularized policy reward; retraining on current-policy negatives allows the reward landscape to evolve with the actor. GLARE attains average human-evaluated win rates of 0.66 on utility and 0.70 on human-likeness, outperforming SFT and SPIN while remaining below the observed human continuation. We also demonstrate MDFB as a social reasoning arena for comparing general-purpose models, including closed-source systems, through reference-assisted judgments. Together, these studies illustrate the benchmark's use for both task-specific learning and output-based evaluation of meeting behavior.
Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

I Am No One: Style-Aware Paraphrasing for Text Anonymization

Authorship attribution models can re-identify users from seemingly anonymized text by exploiting stable stylistic fingerprints, even after explicit identifiers are removed, posing a growing privacy risk for text publishing and analytics. This risk extends to speech-derived text such as ASR transcripts of meetings and call-center conversations, where stylometric leakage can persist even after acoustic anonymization. Differential privacy-based anonymization often severely degrades text quality and utility. We propose a style-aware, prompt-driven anonymization approach that uses pretrained large language models to construct compact stylistic profiles from minimal samples and rewrite text to suppress identifiable style markers while preserving meaning. Across blog and review datasets, our approach reduces authorship attribution F1 by 60-70% while maintaining content quality and readability, substantially outperforming DP-based and non-DP baselines.
Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

The House with a Million Windows: Interactive Fiction for Narrative Restorying

AI-assisted writing can flatten meaning in human storytelling, enabling the production of homogeneous outputs without the intentional effort and sense-making writing entails. To address this challenge, we present The House with a Million Windows (HWAMW), an LLM-based interactive fiction system designed to help users explore both the breadth and depth of potential meanings within their personal stories -- drawing on a psychological paradigm called the restorying intervention. In HWAMW, users play through a text-based narrative in which they tell a story, then encounter a set of LLM-generated "windows" reframing it according to different literary styles. Empirical evidence shows that HWAMW increases users' sense of narrative identity, while an expert review explores how this effect is achieved. Our findings suggest that HWAMW facilitates restorying and offers a valuable paradigm for AI-assisted writing, wherein LLMs do not tell our stories but rather help us see greater potential in the stories we tell.
Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

What Drives Recovery in Agentic Text-to-Cypher? LAST-CQ: An LLM Agent Self-Refinement Framework

Agentic pipelines for structured-query generation are rapidly expanding, but it is unclear which part of the loop produces the gain. We use LAST-CQ -- a five-agent, training-free, execution-grounded Text-to-Cypher framework -- as an instrumented testbed, running three counterfactuals over 2,471 live-database queries and six backbones spanning three vendor scale tiers. Removing correction is worth between 3.1% aggregate execution-BLEU against the single-pass system and 12.3% against a no-refinement counterfactual (up to 80.7% for the weakest backbone). Replacing schema-grounded, LLM-synthesised feedback with raw database error strings costs almost nothing (20.9% vs. 19.9% naive exact match; <0.2% end-to-end; equivalent within ±0.075\pm 0.075 set-F1 by two one-sided tests). Spending the same call budget on parallel sampling degrades quality by 10-11%. What works is detecting failure and routing it to a retry, not the feedback sophistication or number of samples. LAST-CQ itself recovers 91.7% of queries that fail under single-pass generation, while a query that succeeds first time still costs exactly one LLM call. We also show that n-gram overlap on serialised results is not a bound in either direction: it over-scores against set equivalence on 65.9% of results while under-scoring against judged semantics. Finally, we calibrate our LLM judge against blind human labels and find it optimistic by 9 points.
Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

Biomedical Reference Generation Remains Unreliable across 26 Large Language Models

Background. Large language models are increasingly used to help write biomedical text but may fabricate references to nonexistent work. How often large language models do so is not well characterized. Methods. We prompted 26 language models from eight developers (2023 to 2026) to supply a missing reference for each of 69 biomedical passages across ten domains. References were classified as verifiable (real paper with a resolving identifier), partial matches (real paper without a resolving identifier), fabricated (no matching indexed paper), or declined (the model refused to supply a reference). A reference was considered correct in every evaluated bibliographic field only when it was verifiable and its journal, year, and listed authors matched those of the cited paper. Results. Fabrication ranged from 10.2% (Claude Opus 4.8, which declined 52.1% of prompts) to 98.4% (Ministral 3B, which produced no verifiable reference). Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 produced similar proportions of verifiable references (77.6% and 76.6%) but named authors correctly in 78.7% and 28.7% of author-evaluable verifiable references, respectively, and were correct in every evaluated field in 54.6% and 19.9% of responses. GPT-5.5 was correct in every field in 48.1%. Across all models, 55.4% of responses were fabricated and 14.9% were correct in every field. Among the five tested models first released in 2026, the corresponding proportions were 35.3% and 31.8%, respectively. Conclusions. Fabrication remained common, and no model was correct in every evaluated bibliographic field in more than 54.6% of responses. Models that identify real papers may still misstate their metadata, so references produced with model assistance require verification before use.
Sep 14, 2026cs.HC

PeerPen: AI-Assisted Writing for Online Mental Health Peer Support

Online mental health communities thrive on peer support, yet those who volunteer to help often lack formal training and may struggle to articulate supportive responses. AI co-writing could lower this barrier; however, peer support derives much of its value from being perceived as personal, raising questions around authorship, ownership, and trust. We built PeerPen, a writing assistance tool embedded within a Reddit-like interface, supporting two main features: draft generation and revision of user-written responses. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 participants, we find that PeerPen reduced the burden of composing responses and increased confidence in offering support. Participants wanted AI to assist their writing without taking over authorship and anticipated tensions around authenticity and trust. Such assistance could make authorship uncertain even for responses written without it, weakening trust across the community. We contribute design implications for AI writing assistance that scaffolds supportive communication, preserves authorship, and accounts for community-level trust.
Sep 13, 2026cs.AI

Crypto Accounting Bench: Evaluating Frontier and Open-Weight Models on Crypto-Asset Accounting Tasks

We introduce Crypto Accounting Bench (CAB), a benchmark for assessing whether frontier and open-weight language models can reconstruct the complete journal entry that an organization actually posted for a crypto-asset transaction. CAB contains 118 evaluation tasks drawn from 7 pseudonymized organizations. Each task combines transaction mechanics, asset quantities and base-currency values, wallet and legal-entity context, counterparty evidence, related transaction legs, recurrence, tax-lot evidence, and the organization's complete chart of accounts. The target is a balanced structured entry with every required account, side, amount, currency, and full-precision asset quantity. We evaluate 12 models spanning proprietary frontier systems and open-weight releases over 3 independent attempts per task, producing 4,248 trajectories. We report 3 metrics: Mean Score, Best@3, and Pass@3. Pass@3 is the fraction of tasks with at least 1 of 3 attempts that satisfies every rubric criterion and required gate. The leading model reaches 77.43% Mean Score, while the best Pass@3 is 56.78%. Deterministic diagnostics, read from each task's best of 3 attempts and macro-averaged across the 12 models, show higher base-amount agreement (97.8%) than deciding-account accuracy (56.3%). Together with the failure analysis, these results identify account selection and complete-entry composition as the main remaining challenges on CAB.
Sep 12, 2026cs.CL

Multilingual in Name Only? Cultural and Linguistic Weaknesses of LLMs in Urdu

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for open-ended text generation, yet their behaviour in low-resource languages remains poorly understood. In this work, we question how correct and reliable is the generation of multilingual LLMs when used for the task of story generation. We consider Urdu language as a representative low-resource language. We generate Urdu-Stories, a corpus of 93 stories generated using three contemporary LLMs (GPT-5.1, Qwen-3-Max, DeepSeek-3.1). We manually annotate the errors present in them under a nine-label linguistic, semantic, and cultural taxonomy. Our notable findings suggest that LLMs often make basic errors of grammar and semantics. The stories lack coherence, have unnatural repetition and show pervasive cultural shallowness. We further show using few-shot prompting that the cultural and context errors largely remain unresolved. Our findings highlight the limitations of current LLMs as a reliable source of content generation and information retrieval for low-resource languages.
Sep 7, 2026cs.CL

Validating DBpedia Triple Sets for Natural Language Generation

We present a study of the quality of individual DBpedia triples from the perspective of Natural Language Generation, and propose and evaluate an approach for collecting entity-specific triple sets that filters out questionable triples while minimizing the loss of correct ones. We show in an evaluation against manually annotated data that with validation rules, it is possible to reach 98% precision in triple selection, and with improvements to a few Property definitions, it is possible to improve recall by 40% without harming precision.
Sep 2, 2026cs.CL

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

In this paper, we analyze how Large Language Models (LLMs) employ worldbuilding strategies, focusing on setting as one measurable dimension of storyworld construction. We compare 1,000 AI-generated stories per model in English and German with human-authored fiction from Project Gutenberg. Building on prior work, we operationalize setting through five types of narrative space: "action", "perceived," "visual," "descriptive" and "no space", identified using fine-tuned BERT classifiers for German and English. We generate narratives using GPT 4.1, LlaMA 3.3, Mistral 3.2, and Gemma 3 and compare their spatial distributions to a human-authored baseline. We find that human-authored texts predominantly employ "action space," grounding narratives in embodied character-environment interaction, whereas LLMs systematically overproduce "perceived space," emphasizing atmosphere and affect. This divergence remains stable across narrative time. Overall, our findings show that LLMs exhibit worldbuilding patterns that differ consistently from human-authored fiction in ways that are both model-specific and language-sensitive.
Sep 2, 2026cs.CL

PragAlign: Feedback-Guided Pragmatic Alignment for Controlled Synthetic Dialogue Generation

Synthetic dialogue generation can support research in privacy-restricted service settings, but generated conversations must preserve communicative intent, affective meaning, and natural dialogue flow. We introduce PragAlign, a feedback-guided framework for controlled synthetic dialogue generation conditioned on service context, target intent, and target emotion, with auxiliary trait-style controls. PragAlign uses a generate--evaluate--revise loop in which an LLM-based evaluator scores intent alignment, emotion alignment, coherence, fluency, and aggregate quality, then provides criterion-specific feedback for up to three refinement rounds. On 800 matched dialogue specifications, PragAlign achieves 99.50% evaluator-defined acceptance, compared with 72.25% for one-shot generation and 95.88% for repeated generation without structured feedback. This indicates that repeated attempts account for much of the gain over one-shot generation, while structured feedback primarily improves last-mile multi-constraint satisfaction rather than broad average quality. Refinement gains are concentrated in emotion alignment, which is also the dominant failure mode in ablations. A separate human evaluation of 1,200 generated dialogues shows that intent expression and dialogue flow are highly recognizable to annotators, while emotion appropriateness is less stable and more subjective. These results support PragAlign as a quality-control framework for improving evaluator-defined communicative constraint satisfaction, while showing that affective realization and independent human-perceived quality remain open challenges.
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

TalkFa: A Unified Benchmark for Farsi Dialogue Generation and Understanding

Farsi, spoken by more than 120 million people, lacks a comprehensive benchmark for dialogue generation and understanding. We introduce TALKFA, a unified benchmark comprising three complementary datasets: (1) WIKI-FADIAL, 4.2K Wikipedia-grounded dialogues for knowledge-grounded generation; (2) DAILYDIALOG-FA, 6.6K dialogues annotated for dialogue acts and emotions; and (3) PLAYDIAL-FA, 2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels. While LLMs assist data construction, every dialogue undergoes multi-stage review and revision by native Farsi speakers, and only the final human-approved dialogues are released. Experiments with six LLAMA and MISTRAL models show that LoRA substantially improves dialogue generation while requiring only 25-50% of the training data to recover over 90% of the final performance gains. Across classification tasks, FABERT achieves the best dialogue-act performance, LORA-MISTRAL-7B performs best on emotion recognition, and MISTRAL-24B achieves the highest sentiment score. Human evaluation and independent external validation demonstrate the reliability of the benchmark, while comparisons with GPT-4.1 as an LLM judge reveal that automatic metrics substantially overestimate dialogue quality. Zero-shot evaluation with frontier LLMs further shows that TalkFa remains a challenging benchmark. We will release all datasets, annotation guidelines, code, and checkpoints.
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

Ready to Speak: Aligning LLMs for TTS-Friendly Text Generation

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily optimized for written text, often producing outputs that are grammatically correct and helpful yet poorly suited for spoken delivery via Text-to-Speech (TTS). In this work, we study how to make LLMs natively generate TTS-friendly text, which we frame as a preference alignment problem: instead of relying on downstream rewriting modules, we directly align LLMs to generate text optimized for spoken delivery. We introduce two preference datasets spanning different target domains, CORA and Recipe, which contain paired TTS-friendly and TTS-unfriendly responses. We further propose an evaluation suite combining a pattern-based heuristic metric, a TTS→\toASR evaluation pipeline, and a MUSHRA listening study with human judges. Our experiments compare the recently proposed Feature-aware Sampling and Tuning (FaST) framework -- leveraging interpretable features instead of a black-box reward model -- against an array of alignment baselines on the TTS-friendly generation task. Notably, we found that FaST achieves the best overall tradeoff between TTS-friendliness and helpfulness across various settings. We also identified a strong correlation between our different metrics, highlighting the ability to reliably assess TTS-friendliness via an efficient heuristic.
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

PersuaRL: Reinforcement Learning-Driven Multi-Expert Selection for Persuasive Dialogue Generation in Insurance

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing digital communication by powering conversational agents deployed across domains such as customer service, digital sales, and insurance. These agents, built on LLMs, can understand user input, retrieve relevant information, and generate coherent responses. However, while they excel at factual communication, they often lack the ability to engage in truly persuasive, context-sensitive dialogue, especially in domains like insurance, where trust and clarity are critical. Building on this need within the insurance domain, our work focuses on improving the persuasiveness of digital agents, aka LLMs. To support this, we introduce InsureDial, a Persuasive Insurance Dialogue dataset, designed to capture the nuances of persuasive communication specific to motor insurance interactions. We introduce PersuaRL, a reinforcement learning-based framework that equips LLM-driven dialogue agents with the ability to adaptively explore, select, and coordinate strategies across multiple expert modules, guided by the evolving dialogue context, to achieve more effective persuasion. We conduct extensive automatic human and qualitative evaluations on two benchmark persuasion dialogue datasets, including our InsureDial. Our evaluations consistently demonstrate that PersuaRL outperforms baseline, generating contextually appropriate and highly persuasive responses.
Aug 30, 2026cs.CL

XQDT: eXplainable and Quantitative Data-Text Alignment Metric with Feedback Signals

Evaluating data-text alignment remains challenging: existing metrics often provide limited explanations for the scores, while prompt-based LLM-as-Judge methods can be expensive and unreliable. We present an end-to-end explainable evaluation metric that fine-tunes a language model to identify omitted, extra, incorrect, and correct data units in a data-text pair. These local judgements are aggregated into precision, recall, and F1 scores, providing both fine-grained diagnostic feedback and an interpretable measure of alignment quality. Across benchmarks, our fine-tuned models outperform LLM-as-Judge methods in error prediction and achieve competitive precision, recall, and F1 scores, while maintaining strong correlation with human judgements. Beyond evaluation, our verifier outputs also provide useful feedback signals for downstream correction and refinement, supporting alignment-oriented improvement of data-to-text and text-to-data. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/guihuzhang/xqdt.
Aug 28, 2026cs.CL

AI Writers Have a Consistent Stylometric Footprint, but AI Editors Do Not

Text generated by large language models (LLMs) has been shown to be stylometrically distinct from human-written text (Andre et al., 2023; Shah et al., 2023; Opara, 2024; Soto et al., 2024; Li and Zhang, 2025; Selvioglu et al., 2025). But LLMs are increasingly used not only to generate text but also to edit human writing, and it is unclear whether the two leave the same trace. We show that AI generation leaves a consistent "stylometric footprint": a small subset of features, primarily entropy and lexical diversity, consistently separates AI-generated text from human writing across 8 LLMs and 5 domains, while the remaining features depend heavily on the domain and generator. AI editing, however, does not reproduce the same footprint. Relative to their human- written sources, AI-edited texts show only a small increase in lexical diversity and a decrease in entropy, rather than the joint increase that characterizes AI generation. Lexical density, which contributes little to generation, instead becomes the dominant editing-associated signal. Stylometric features therefore separate AI-edited text from AI-generated text but are substantially less effective at separating it from human-written text. Our results suggest that "AI text" is not a single phenomenon: generation and editing leave qualitatively different stylometric traces and should be studied separately.
Aug 26, 2026cs.CL

Unfolding Scientific Papers into Multi-Turn Generation Trajectories for Continued Pre-Training

A recent line of synthetic-data work reconstructs the thinking behind existing text rather than rewriting the text itself, but it operates on short web passages, recovers only local thoughts, and leaves the structure of whole documents untouched. Scientific papers are written to a clear and largely uniform structure and make a natural substrate for lifting this paradigm to the document level. We present a pipeline that unfolds each paper into a multi-turn generation trajectory in which a teacher model reconstructs the writing process of the whole paper: a writing request, a global plan, and pre-writing deliberation for each section. All section texts and the abstract are kept verbatim from the source paper. We apply the pipeline to 1.8M quality-filtered arXiv papers and obtain a 60B-token corpus for continued pre-training (CPT) that is roughly twice the source text. The same reverse construction extends to instruction data and evaluation. We build an SFT dataset of 200K samples using answers derived from paper text. We also use held-out papers to construct PAW-Bench, a benchmark of 2,940 academic writing tasks with per-task rubrics and checklists. In controlled experiments, CPT on our corpus followed by SFT on public datasets improves writing performance while preserving general reasoning and improving long document reading. Replacing part of the writing SFT data with our synthetic instruction data further improves performance on PAW-Bench.
Aug 12, 2026cs.CR

SoK: From Generation to Consumption of Privacy Documents in Software Systems

Privacy documents (e.g., privacy policies) are a central mechanism through which digital services disclose data practices and seek user consent. Over the past decades, research on privacy documents has expanded significantly, encompassing not only traditional privacy policies but also short notices (e.g., privacy labels) and interface-level transparency mechanisms. As this research area continues to grow, it has become increasingly difficult to obtain a coherent view of how privacy documents are created, analyzed, evaluated, and maintained across their lifecycle. This SoK provides a unified, lifecycle-oriented view of privacy documents from a software engineering perspective. We systematically review and analyze 290 papers published between 2010 and 2025, organizing them around five research questions that examine how privacy documents are (1) defined and scoped, (2) generated, (3) analyzed and extracted, (4) checked for inconsistencies and noncompliance, and (5) evaluated and improved for usability. Building on our findings, we identify 15 key research trends and 21 open opportunities. We further chart four broader research directions that highlight (i) emerging challenges in AI-centric platforms, (ii) the need for diverse and up-to-date data foundations, (iii) LLM-based unified policy-code analysis, and (iv) dual usability for end-users and developers. We hope this SoK provides a shared foundation for future research on privacy policies and privacy documents.
Aug 11, 2026cs.CL

ConVAWG: A Retrieval-Grounded Framework for Controlled Synthetic Dialogue Generation in Violence Against Women and Girls

Synthetic dialogue generation offers a way to study conversational dynamics in sensitive domains where real data are difficult to access, release, or annotate. The underlying abuse may occur online or offline: threats and coercion can appear directly in messages, while behaviours such as surveillance, isolation, stalking, and physical violence may be planned, disclosed, or referred to conversationally. Privacy and legal constraints make it difficult the release of large-scale real conversation datasets; existing work has mostly focused on sentence-level toxicity of online abuses, leaving a gap in modelling abuse as a relational and temporally unfolding phenomenon. In this work, we focus on modelling Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) scenarios as multi-turn dialogues. We introduce ConVAWG, a retrieval-grounded framework for generating CPS-aligned synthetic VAWG chat dialogues. ConVAWG builds scenarios from persona seeds, demographic patterns reported by the UK Office for National Statistics, official crime definitions, and retrieved Domestic Homicide Review cases; converts them into hierarchical event timelines; generates multi-scene role-play dialogues; and applies targeted activation-steered toxicity control to appropriate utterances. We release over 6,000 multi-turn dialogue events across 200 scenarios with rich scenario-, event-, and turn-level metadata. Extensive human evaluation, LLM-as-Judge assessment, ablations, and downstream tasks show strong dialogue quality and domain fidelity.
Aug 10, 2026cs.HC

VeriForge: Mitigating Latent Knowledge Gaps in Narrative Drafting via Mixed-Initiative Scaffolding

Great fiction earns its verisimilitude through precise details, from how a longsword is gripped to pierce armor gaps to why a bleeding corpse cannot yet smell of decay, weaving domain expertise into the fabric of invented worlds. Current AI writing tools offer limited support for discovering and integrating unfamiliar domain knowledge into narrative. They require explicit queries that authors cannot formulate, generate finished prose that risks homogenizing voice, or assist only within the boundaries of what authors already know. We argue that AI should reveal latent knowledge gaps to writers while preserving their agency to transform discovered knowledge into authentic prose. Grounded in formative interviews with 9 fiction writers, we present VeriForge, a mixed-initiative writing system that divides cognitive labor so that the system assumes initiative over domain discovery while the author retains full initiative over narrative synthesis. VeriForge realizes this through three complementary mechanisms. Proactive inline highlighting flags potential knowledge gaps as authors draft. Dual-stream querying pairs conversational responses with source-anchored Knowledge Cards for direct fact extraction. A spatial Knowledge Canvas allows authors to organize and connect discovered knowledge across their writing. These mechanisms are powered by a graph-based retrieval-augmented generation pipeline grounded in domain-specific source materials. A within-subjects user study (N=12) provides preliminary evidence that this paradigm helps authors recognize previously overlooked knowledge gaps, supports creative exploration, and is perceived by expert raters to produce passages with stronger domain grounding in a controlled cold-start writing task.
Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

RISE-RL: Rubric-Informed Selective Exploration for Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) for open-ended tasks is challenging because responses must satisfy multidimensional criteria without following a single correct generation trajectory. Existing rubric-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods compress fine-grained criterion-level feedback into scalar rewards, making persistent capability gaps difficult to target under limited on-policy exploration. We propose RISE-RL\textbf{RISE-RL} (Rubric-Informed Selective Exploration), which uses repeatedly missed rubric criteria to elicit privileged trajectories that are difficult to discover through unguided exploration alone. RISE-RL retains only trajectories whose complete-rubric reward exceeds the mean reward of natural rollouts, and then re-evaluates them under the original prompt to emphasize behaviors that remain weakly supported by the natural policy. The resulting guidance signal is optimized through a separate auxiliary objective and removed once its additional benefit diminishes. Experiments with 4B and 14B models across writing, chat, health, and science show that RISE-RL achieves the highest mean score on every evaluated benchmark under guidance-free evaluation. Compared with standard Rubric-RL, it improves the average score by 1.3 points at the 4B scale and 3.3 points at the 14B scale\textbf{3.3 points at the 14B scale}, including a 6.0-point\textbf{6.0-point} gain on CreativeWriting-V3. It also improves creative-writing diversity and yields gains on objectively scored medical and scientific benchmarks. These results indicate that selective internalization through reward filtering and policy support shaping is effective for open-ended reinforcement learning.
Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

Generative Models: Principles, Architectures, and Applications

Generative AI has emerged as one of the most transformative forces in modern artificial intelligence, reshaping how we create, imagine, and interact with digital content. From photorealistic images to coherent text, from immersive videos to novel molecular structures, generative models now power applications that were once confined to science fiction. This book is designed to guide readers through the foundational principles, mathematical underpinnings, and practical architectures that underpin this revolution.
Aug 7, 2026cs.CL

CreativeInstruct: Scalably Teaching LLMs to Balance Quality, Creativity, and Diversity

While post-training improves the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), it generally lowers their output diversity and creativity, negatively impacting tasks that explicitly require creativity (e.g., story generation) as well as those that require it implicitly, e.g., reinforcement learning (RL). We instead propose CreativeInstruct, a scalable instruction-tuning method that teaches LLMs to balance creative, base-model-like generations with the quality of post-trained models, by learning to inject special [StartCreativity] spans that bias generation toward creativity. Furthermore, we introduce a structural diversity metric based on graph edit distance, which captures narrative level variation missed by purely lexical and semantic metrics. On narrative generation, CreativeInstruct matches or exceeds the diversity of both multi-model baselines and distilled variants of their outputs, without sacrificing quality or requiring multiple models at inference time. These results are mirrored in our human evaluation, where we find that annotators rate CreativeInstruct generations as more creative than the post-trained LLMs' generations in 70.3% of cases. We also show the benefits of creative models as a substrate for RL: GRPO applied to a CreativeInstruct checkpoint improves by ~4% on AMC and ~5% points on MATH over the same training applied to the post-trained checkpoint.
Aug 7, 2026cs.CL

Can Language Models Imagine Without Seeing? Ekphrasis: Measuring Visual Creative Ideation in Text-Only LLMs

Current evaluations do not isolate whether text-only language models can originate visual concepts before image generation. Fluent visual prose can hide visual-plan failures: an answer may appear creative while repeating familiar visual clichés or failing to specify a renderable scene. We define Visual Creative Ideation (VCI) as the ability to produce textual visual plans that are useful, expressive, and population-novel, and introduce Ekphrasis, a 400-task benchmark spanning Abstraction, Combination, Transformation, and Adaptation. Ekphrasis scores anonymized pairwise comparisons with dimension-specific checklists, aggregates preferences with Bradley-Terry models, and uses Typed Idea Graphs to convert task-specific population clichés into novelty references. Across 14 language models, VCI separates usefulness, expressiveness, and novelty rather than reducing to fluency: strong models achieve similar overall scores through different profiles, and useful plans can remain visually clichéd. A cross-modal grounding study further shows that text-level VCI ordering largely survives faithful rendering and blind image-level preference judgment, supporting Ekphrasis as a measure of visual ideation beyond prose quality.
Aug 6, 2026cs.CL

Where Models Converge and Humans Diverge: A Coverage Framework for Distributional Pluralism in Open-Ended Generation

When a large language model (LLM) writes Harry Potter fanfiction, it reliably produces fundamental elements of the Hogwarts universe, such as recognizable places and characters. Human-written Harry Potter fanfictions, however, typically include these fundamentals and much more, incorporating stylistically irregular content and relationship-diverse plotlines. This gap between LLM and human writing has been noted across a variety of domains. LLMs tend to produce "average" writing, while human writing contains more diverse content that covers a broader distribution. Existing work has shown the existence of this distributional "gap", but no work has proposed a systematic way to measure it. Our paper proposes a human-grounded framework that uses the empirical distribution of human writing on a topic to measure the distributional breadth of LLM-generated content on that same topic. We propose two metrics, LLM Coverage (LLM-Cov) and In-Boundary Rate (IBR), that separate the plausibility of LLM content from its distributional breadth. Across ideation and narrative tasks, we find that current LLMs produce plausible but narrow content that concentrates near the center of the human response space. Our framework can enable researchers to better assess the distributional breadth of LLM-authored content, which we term its "cultural reach".
Aug 5, 2026cs.AI

Traceable LLM-Generated Hazard Scenarios for Operational Safety Analysis of Aviation Systems Using ASRS Reports

Operational hazard analysis of aviation system operations must consider interactions among weather, ATC actions, airspace constraints, aircraft operations, and human factors - distinct from the functional hazard assessment applied at the aircraft-system level. We present an AI-assisted approach that generates candidate hazard scenarios from NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). Given a target adverse outcome, it produces a structured hypothesis as categorical factors and a narrative scenario describing an operational event sequence consistent with the structure. Each scenario includes by a plausibility score from historical co-occurrence evidence and traceability to the most similar held-out ASRS reports. We then propose a hybrid variant, conditioning narrative generation on a structured hypothesis produced via evolutionary abduction, improving correctness and reducing variability. We evaluate multiple large language models, zero-shot versus few-shot prompting, and optional fine-tuning, measuring how prompting and model choice affect the validity and realism of the generated structures and narratives.
Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

On the Diversity of Analogy Making in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential for analogy making, a core cognitive capability that drives novelty and creativity. While prior research has extensively investigated the applications and underlying mechanisms of LLM-based analogy making, its output diversity remains largely unexplored, despite being essential for broadening cross-domain connections and fostering scientific innovation. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of analogy diversity across ten state-of-the-art open- and closed-source LLMs. Our findings highlight a concerning issue of domain homogeneity, a prevalent tendency for LLMs to generate analogies from a narrow set of target domains, limiting both inter-query and intra-model diversity. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off in existing LLM diversity-enhancement methods: increasing output diversity often comes at the expense of output quality. Finally, our causal analysis of LLM information flow reveals substantial differences in the model-sensitive regions governing analogy diversity across LLMs, suggesting a potential mechanism for the observed diversity-quality trade-off. To our knowledge, this is among the first studies to systematically investigate output diversity in LLM-based analogy making.
Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

Internalizing Academic Writing Workflows for Introduction Generation via Struct-Aware Policy Learning

Generating a rigorous paper introduction with large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, since it requires coordinating background, gap identification, method and contribution within a coherent narrative. Existing solutions externalize this process as multi-stage prompts or agent workflows which are expensive and vulnerable to cross-stage drift. We propose StructPO, a struct-aware policy learning framework that internalizes the entire multi-stage writing workflow into a single-pass policy controlled by explicit stage tokens. StructPO introduces struct-aware credit assignment to decouple local stage quality from global coherence and refinement-guided optimization to internalize revision behavior into the first-pass policy. Experiments show that StructPO improves semantic alignment, structural rationality and inference efficiency over workflow-based baselines, generalizes to out-of-domain settings, and remains competitive with GPT-5.1 in human evaluation when scaled to Qwen3-32B. These results show that internalizing academic writing workflows through fine-grained policy optimization offers a viable alternative to costly external orchestration.
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

AIDE: Automated Instruction via Distilled Expertise for Reference-Free Motor Skill Coaching

Generating natural-language coaching feedback on motor skills can accelerate learning, yet expert coaches are scarce and expensive. Existing reference-based methods require expert demonstrations at both training and inference time, limiting practical deployment. We propose AIDE (Automated Instruction via Distilled Expertise), a framework that exploits expert references only during training and generates feedback from a learner's pose sequence alone at inference. A teacher model first learns to generate feedback from paired learner-expert poses via a frozen language model, producing separate learner tokens and difference tokens that encode the learner-expert difference. A student model then inherits the teacher's encoder and weight initialization, replacing the explicit expert comparison with an auxiliary module that produces complementary tokens from the learner's pose alone. On the ExpertAF dataset, AIDE outperforms reference-free baselines on most metrics and performs comparably to methods requiring expert demonstrations at both training and inference, with LLM-based evaluation supporting these findings.
Aug 3, 2026cs.LG

Rubrics as Privileged Information for Open-Ended Generation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD), where a single model acts as both student and teacher with different contexts, has shown promise in verifiable domains like math, where hard privileged information (PI) in the form of ground-truth answers structurally constrains valid continuations. We extend OPSD to open-ended generation using soft PI in the form of rubrics that guide preferences but admit many valid responses. Rubrics have served as scalar rewards for reinforcement learning (RL); we show that they provide substantially richer signal as dense PI for distillation, and contrary to intuition, soft rubric PI provides a larger and more effective training signal on student roll-outs than hard reference completion PI in this regime. A reference completion is one point in a set of valid responses, so distilling towards it over-constrains the student, while rubrics specify the preference structure shared across the set of valid responses. We show the effectiveness of using rubrics as PI for open-ended generation across Qwen and Llama model families and show that it outperforms rubric-as-reward (RaR) RL using HealthBench, a benchmark that grades open-ended health responses against physician-created rubrics, providing dense token-level supervision for open-ended tasks; RuPI beats RaR RL by up to +0.10 absolute score and, under matched recipe and KL direction, beats reference-PI by +0.034 to +0.079 absolute score across three models. We further show that these findings generalize to training on the RubricHub Science corpus and evaluating on ResearchQA: soft rubric PI outperforms both reference-PI distillation and RaR RL (66.6% vs. 64.2% and 57.6%).