# STAGE: A Full-Screenplay Benchmark for Reasoning over Evolving Stories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08510 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08510/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 10 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [NovelQA: Benchmarking Question Answering on Documents Exceeding 200K Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12766/) (2024)
- [Consistency in Language Models: Current Landscape, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00268/) (2025)
- [Too Long, Didn't Model: Decomposing LLM Long-Context Understanding With Novels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14925/) (2025)
- [CML-Bench: A Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing LLM-Powered Movie Scripts Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06231/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [From Personas to Plot: Character-Grounded Multi-Agent Story Generation for Long-Form Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00918/) (2026)
- [Narrative Knowledge Weaver: Narrative-Centric Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Long-Form Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05724/) (2026)
- [PACE: Precise AI Cinematic Expression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19853/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Movie screenplays are a demanding testbed for long-form narrative understanding, as characters' goals, beliefs, knowledge, and relationships evolve continuously across scenes. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate isolated facts from the completed screenplay, leaving unassessed whether models can track the evolving state of characters as the story unfolds. We introduce STAGE, a benchmark over 151 English and Chinese full-length screenplays, built on a provenance-linked narrative backbone that recovers the state and epistemic access of each character at every point along its timeline. Three tasks derived from the backbone jointly probe whether models can maintain, explain, and act on evolving narrative state: Character Development Tracking updates a focal character's state between checkpoints, Cross-Scene Narrative Evolution Reasoning targets cross-scene state transitions, and In-Script Character Role-Playing requires responses bounded by the character's state and knowledge at a specified point. We identify three failure modes of current LLMs: silent forgetting under recursive state updating, limited cross-scene reasoning even when all relevant evidence is supplied, and a trade-off in role-playing where stylistic character fidelity and screenplay-grounded memory faithfulness are optimized by different memory-access strategies. STAGE thus provides a unified framework for diagnosing how current models fail to track, reason about, and enact story evolution.