Directing the Narrative: A Finetuning Method for Controlling Coherence and Style in Story Generation

Story visualization requires generating sequential imagery that aligns semantically with evolving narratives while maintaining rigorous consistency in character identity and visual style. However, existing methodologies often struggle with subject inconsistency and identity drift, particularly when depicting complex interactions or extended narrative arcs. To address these challenges, we propose a cohesive two-stage framework designed for robust and consistent story generation. First, we introduce Group-Shared Attention (GSA), a mechanism that fosters intrinsic consistency by enabling lossless cross-sample information flow within attention layers. This allows the model to structurally encode identity correspondence across frames without relying on external encoders. Second, we leverage Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align generated outputs with human aesthetic and narrative standards. Unlike conventional methods that rely on conflicting auxiliary losses, our approach simultaneously enhances visual fidelity and identity preservation by learning from holistic preference data. Extensive evaluations on the ViStoryBench benchmark demonstrate that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming strong baselines with gains of +10.0 in Character Identity (CIDS) and +18.7 in Style Consistency (CSD), all while preserving high-fidelity generation.

A Preliminary Evaluation of ChatGPT in Requirements Information Retrieval

Context: Recently, many illustrative examples have shown ChatGPT's impressive ability to perform programming tasks and answer general domain questions. Objective: We empirically evaluate how ChatGPT performs on requirements analysis tasks to derive insights into how generative large language model, represented by ChatGPT, influence the research and practice of natural language processing for requirements engineering. Method: We design an evaluation pipeline including two common requirements information retrieval tasks, four public datasets involving two typical requirements artifacts, querying ChatGPT with fixed task prompts, and quantitative and qualitative results analysis. Results: Quantitative results show that ChatGPT achieves comparable or better $F\beta$ values in all datasets under a zero-shot setting. Qualitative analysis further illustrates ChatGPT's powerful natural language processing ability and limited requirements engineering domain knowledge. Conclusion: The evaluation results demonstrate ChatGPT' impressive ability to retrieve requirements information from different types artifacts involving multiple languages under a zero-shot setting. It is worthy for the research and industry communities to study generative large language model based requirements retrieval models and to develop corresponding tools.