Let CONAN tell you a story: Procedural quest generation

This work proposes an engine for the Creation Of Novel Adventure Narrative (CONAN), which is a procedural quest generator. It uses a planning approach to story generation. The engine is tested on its ability to create quests, which are sets of actions that must be performed in order to achieve a certain goal, usually for a reward. The engine takes in a world description represented as a set of facts, including characters, locations, and items, and generates quests according to the state of the world and the preferences of the characters. We evaluate quests through the classification of the motivations behind the quests, based on the sequences of actions required to complete the quests. We also compare different world descriptions and analyze the difference in motivations for the quests produced by the engine. Compared against human structural quest analysis, the current engine was found to be able to replicate the quest structures found in commercial video game quests.

Image Quality Assessment Techniques Show Improved Training and Evaluation of Autoencoder Generative Adversarial Networks

We propose a training and evaluation approach for autoencoder Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), specifically the Boundary Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Network (BEGAN), based on methods from the image quality assessment literature. Our approach explores a multidimensional evaluation criterion that utilizes three distance functions: an $l_1$ score, the Gradient Magnitude Similarity Mean (GMSM) score, and a chrominance score. We show that each of the different distance functions captures a slightly different set of properties in image space and, consequently, requires its own evaluation criterion to properly assess whether the relevant property has been adequately learned. We show that models using the new distance functions are able to produce better images than the original BEGAN model in predicted ways.