PlotTwist: A Creative Plot Generation Framework with Small Language Models

Creative plot generation presents a fundamental challenge for language models: transforming a concise premise into a coherent narrative that sustains global structure, character development, and emotional resonance. Although recent Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong fluency across general-purpose tasks, they typically require preference alignment to perform well on specialized domains such as creative plot generation. However, conducting such alignment at the scale of frontier LLMs is computationally prohibitive, significantly limiting accessibility and practical deployment. To address this, we present PlotTwist, a structured framework that enables Small Language Models (SLMs) with $\leq$ 5B active parameters to generate high-quality, premise-conditioned plots competitive with frontier systems up to $200\times$ larger. Our approach decomposes generation into three specialized components: (1) an Aspect Rating Reward Model trained via a novel Positive-Negative prompting strategy to deliver structured narratives across five Narrative Quality Dimensions (NQDs); (2) a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) plot generator aligned via Direct Preference Optimization on high-confidence preference pairs; and (3) an Agentic Evaluation module that emulates human critical judgment for unbiased post-hoc assessment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PlotTwist consistently outperforms frontier models across multiple NQDs despite substantially tighter capacity constraints. Further validation confirms strong sensitivity to narrative quality, as the framework reliably distinguishes plots derived from critically acclaimed versus widely panned screenplays. Together, these results establish structured, preference-based alignment as a resource-efficient approach to high-quality creative plot generation.

KANITE: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for ITE estimation

We introduce KANITE, a framework leveraging Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for Individual Treatment Effect (ITE) estimation under multiple treatments setting in causal inference. By utilizing KAN's unique abilities to learn univariate activation functions as opposed to learning linear weights by Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), we improve the estimates of ITEs. The KANITE framework comprises two key architectures: 1.Integral Probability Metric (IPM) architecture: This employs an IPM loss in a specialized manner to effectively align towards ITE estimation across multiple treatments. 2. Entropy Balancing (EB) architecture: This uses weights for samples that are learned by optimizing entropy subject to balancing the covariates across treatment groups. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that KANITE outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in both $\epsilon_{\text{PEHE}}$ and $\epsilon_{\text{ATE}}$ metrics. Our experiments highlight the advantages of KANITE in achieving improved causal estimates, emphasizing the potential of KANs to advance causal inference methodologies across diverse application areas.

I See, Therefore I Do: Estimating Causal Effects for Image Treatments

Causal effect estimation under observational studies is challenging due to the lack of ground truth data and treatment assignment bias. Though various methods exist in literature for addressing this problem, most of them ignore multi-dimensional treatment information by considering it as scalar, either continuous or discrete. Recently, certain works have demonstrated the utility of this rich yet complex treatment information into the estimation process, resulting in better causal effect estimation. However, these works have been demonstrated on either graphs or textual treatments. There is a notable gap in existing literature in addressing higher dimensional data such as images that has a wide variety of applications. In this work, we propose a model named NICE (Network for Image treatments Causal effect Estimation), for estimating individual causal effects when treatments are images. NICE demonstrates an effective way to use the rich multidimensional information present in image treatments that helps in obtaining improved causal effect estimates. To evaluate the performance of NICE, we propose a novel semi-synthetic data simulation framework that generates potential outcomes when images serve as treatments. Empirical results on these datasets, under various setups including the zero-shot case, demonstrate that NICE significantly outperforms existing models that incorporate treatment information for causal effect estimation.

Estimation of individual causal effects in network setup for multiple treatments

We study the problem of estimation of Individual Treatment Effects (ITE) in the context of multiple treatments and networked observational data. Leveraging the network information, we aim to utilize hidden confounders that may not be directly accessible in the observed data, thereby enhancing the practical applicability of the strong ignorability assumption. To achieve this, we first employ Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) to learn a shared representation of the confounders. Then, our approach utilizes separate neural networks to infer potential outcomes for each treatment. We design a loss function as a weighted combination of two components: representation loss and Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss on the factual outcomes. To measure the representation loss, we extend existing metrics such as Wasserstein and Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) from the binary treatment setting to the multiple treatments scenario. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology, we conduct a series of experiments on the benchmark datasets such as BlogCatalog and Flickr. The experimental results consistently demonstrate the superior performance of our models when compared to baseline methods.