Spoiler Alert: Narrative Forecasting as a Metric for Tension in LLM Storytelling

LLMs have so far failed both to generate consistently compelling stories and to recognize this failure--on the leading creative-writing benchmark (EQ-Bench), LLM judges rank zero-shot AI stories above New Yorker short stories, a gold standard for literary fiction. We argue that existing rubrics overlook a key dimension of compelling human stories: narrative tension. We introduce the 100-Endings metric, which walks through a story sentence by sentence: at each position, a model predicts how the story will end 100 times given only the text so far, and we measure tension as how often predictions fail to match the ground truth. Beyond the mismatch rate, the sentence-level curve yields complementary statistics, such as inflection rate, a geometric measure of how frequently the curve reverses direction, tracking twists and revelations. Unlike rubric-based judges, 100-Endings correctly ranks New Yorker stories far above LLM outputs. Grounded in narratological principles, we design a story-generation pipeline using structural constraints, including analysis of story templates, idea formulation, and narrative scaffolding. Our pipeline significantly increases narrative tension as measured by the 100-Endings metric, while maintaining performance on the EQ-Bench leaderboard.

FBINeRF: Feature-Based Integrated Recurrent Network for Pinhole and Fisheye Neural Radiance Fields

Previous studies aiming to optimize and bundle-adjust camera poses using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), such as BARF and DBARF, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in 3D scene reconstruction. However, these approaches have been designed for pinhole-camera pose optimization and do not perform well under radial image distortions such as those in fisheye cameras. Furthermore, inaccurate depth initialization in DBARF results in erroneous geometric information affecting the overall convergence and quality of results. In this paper, we propose adaptive GRUs with a flexible bundle-adjustment method adapted to radial distortions and incorporate feature-based recurrent neural networks to generate continuous novel views from fisheye datasets. Other NeRF methods for fisheye images, such as SCNeRF and OMNI-NeRF, use projected ray distance loss for distorted pose refinement, causing severe artifacts, long rendering time, and are difficult to use in downstream tasks, where the dense voxel representation generated by a NeRF method needs to be converted into a mesh representation. We also address depth initialization issues by adding MiDaS-based depth priors for pinhole images. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the generalization capacity of FBINeRF and show high-fidelity results for both pinhole-camera and fisheye-camera NeRFs.