Challenge: Existing visual storytelling models fail to generate correct referring expressions for characters, causing 60% of the generated stories to be lacking local coherence.
Approach: They propose a loss function inspired by a linguistic theory of coherence for self-supervised learning for image sequence representations and a feature matching metric to check whether the models generate referring expressions correctly for characters in input image sequences.
Outcome: The proposed features and loss function are effective for generating more coherent and visually grounded stories.

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Challenge: Existing methods for image captioning do not guarantee consistent image-text relations . current models do not provide enough data for training robust captioning models .
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Text-to-Text Automatic Story Generation: A Survey (2026.eacl-srw)

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Challenge: Automated story generation aims to produce coherent, engaging, and contextually consistent narratives with minimal or no human involvement . despite advances in large language models, maintaining narrative coherence, character consistency, storyline diversity, and plot controllability in generating stories is still challenging.
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Visual Writing Prompts: Character-Grounded Story Generation with Curated Image Sequences (2023.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Existing work on image-based story generation lacks coherent plots for story generation.
Approach: They propose to use image sequences to generate stories from a dataset that has more coherent plots.
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Long Text Generation by Modeling Sentence-Level and Discourse-Level Coherence (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing generation models struggle to maintain a coherent event sequence throughout the generated text.
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Generating Visual Stories with Grounded and Coreferent Characters (2026.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that our model generates visual stories with consistent and coreferent character mentions compared to baselines and state-of-the-art systems.
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Improving Generation and Evaluation of Visual Stories via Semantic Consistency (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Story visualization is an underexplored task that requires a generative model to generate images . prior work has focused on image generation but there is room for improvement .
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Coherence boosting: When your pretrained language model is not paying enough attention (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Long-range semantic coherence remains a challenge in automatic language generation and understanding.
Approach: They propose a procedure that increases a model’s focus on a long context by distributional analyses of generated ordinary text and dialog responses.
Outcome: The proposed procedure increases the model's focus on a long context.
A Neural Local Coherence Model for Text Quality Assessment (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to local coherence modeling capture text relatedness at the level of sentence-to-sentence transitions.
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Story Generation with Rich Details (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Recent neural story generation systems have been able to produce coherent stories.
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A Novel Computational Modeling Foundation for Automatic Coherence Assessment (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models for text coherence assessment rely on a proxy task . however, this approach does not capture the full range of factors contributing to coherency.
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