Humans vs Vision-Language Models: A Unified Measure of Narrative Coherence

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ilinykh, Nikolai, Jang, Hyewon, Lappin, Shalom, Sayeed, Asad, Loáiciga, Sharid
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Ilinykh, Nikolai
Jang, Hyewon
Lappin, Shalom
Sayeed, Asad
Loáiciga, Sharid
author_facet Ilinykh, Nikolai
Jang, Hyewon
Lappin, Shalom
Sayeed, Asad
Loáiciga, Sharid
contents We study narrative coherence in visually grounded stories by comparing human-written narratives with those generated by vision-language models (VLMs) on the Visual Writing Prompts corpus. Using a set of metrics that capture different aspects of narrative coherence, including coreference, discourse relation types, topic continuity, character persistence, and multimodal character grounding, we compute a narrative coherence score. We find that VLMs show broadly similar coherence profiles that differ systematically from those of humans. In addition, differences for individual measures are often subtle, but they become clearer when considered jointly. Overall, our results indicate that, despite human-like surface fluency, model narratives exhibit systematic differences from those of humans in how they organise discourse across a visually grounded story. Our code is available at https://github.com/GU-CLASP/coherence-driven-humans.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_25537
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Humans vs Vision-Language Models: A Unified Measure of Narrative Coherence
Ilinykh, Nikolai
Jang, Hyewon
Lappin, Shalom
Sayeed, Asad
Loáiciga, Sharid
Computation and Language
We study narrative coherence in visually grounded stories by comparing human-written narratives with those generated by vision-language models (VLMs) on the Visual Writing Prompts corpus. Using a set of metrics that capture different aspects of narrative coherence, including coreference, discourse relation types, topic continuity, character persistence, and multimodal character grounding, we compute a narrative coherence score. We find that VLMs show broadly similar coherence profiles that differ systematically from those of humans. In addition, differences for individual measures are often subtle, but they become clearer when considered jointly. Overall, our results indicate that, despite human-like surface fluency, model narratives exhibit systematic differences from those of humans in how they organise discourse across a visually grounded story. Our code is available at https://github.com/GU-CLASP/coherence-driven-humans.
title Humans vs Vision-Language Models: A Unified Measure of Narrative Coherence
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25537