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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25537 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25537/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 9 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [MovieNet: A Holistic Dataset for Movie Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10937/) (2020)
- [Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22954/) (2025)
- [QUDsim: Quantifying Discourse Similarities in LLM-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09373/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LLM and Human Modes of Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21616/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.