Kerry Luo | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

From Personas to Plot: Character-Grounded Multi-Agent Story Generation for Long-Form Narratives

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive creative fiction generation, they struggle to maintain narrative consistency and coherent plot lines in long-form stories. In this work, we introduce a unified framework for long-form narrative generation and verification. MAGNET, a multi-agent goal-driven narrative engine for storytelling, generates stories with persona-grounded character agents that propose actions based on a shared world state and evolving story goals, while ATLAS is a graph-based pipeline that compares scene-level world representations across a generated story to detect hallucinations. By evaluating MAGNET using an LLM editor, pairwise rubric scoring, and ATLAS, we show that our framework produces coherent narratives compared to single-model prompting and IBSEN. At 100 pages, MAGNET reduced annotations and hallucinations by 41 and 50%, respectively, compared to the single model baseline and by 34 and 45%, respectively, compared to IBSEN, with pairwise rubric evaluation showing similar results. These results suggest that long-form narratives can emerge from explicit world-state tracking and goal-driven multi-agent generation, providing a foundation for controllable and structurally coherent long-form narrative generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ASCIIBench: Evaluating Language-Model-Based Understanding of Visually-Oriented Text

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated several emergent behaviors with scale, including reasoning and fluency in long-form text generation. However, they continue to struggle with tasks requiring precise spatial and positional reasoning. ASCII art, a symbolic medium where characters encode structure and form, provides a unique probe of this limitation. We introduce ASCIIBench, a novel benchmark for evaluating both the generation and classification of ASCII-text images. ASCIIBench consists of a filtered dataset of 5,315 class-labeled ASCII images and is, to our knowledge, the first publicly available benchmark of its kind. Alongside the dataset, we release weights for a fine-tuned CLIP model adapted to capture ASCII structure, enabling the evaluation of LLM-generated ASCII art. Our analysis shows that cosine similarity over CLIP embeddings fails to separate most ASCII categories, yielding chance-level performance even for low-variance classes. In contrast, classes with high internal mean similarity exhibit clear discriminability, revealing that the bottleneck lies in representation rather than generational variance. These findings position ASCII art as a stress test for multimodal representations and motivate the development of new embedding methods or evaluation metrics tailored to symbolic visual modalities. All resources are available at https://github.com/ASCIIBench/ASCIIBench.

cs.LG↗