When Reasoning Supervision Hurts: TTCW-Based Long-Form Literary Review Generation
Quick Take
TTCW-based literary review generation shows reasoning supervision can hinder performance in long-form evaluations.
Key Points
- Constructed a dataset of 263,911 long-form stories.
- Non-reasoning fine-tuning outperforms reasoning-supervised models.
- Reasoning supervision leads to irrelevant or repetitive outputs.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readAbstract:Automatic evaluation of long-form literary writing remains challenging, as generic LLM-as-Judge approaches may not fully capture creativity-related dimensions such as originality and flexibility. Although the Torrance Test of Creative Writing (TTCW) provides a structured creativity framework, and prior work has demonstrated reference-based TTCW evaluation at the pairwise level, no large-scale dataset exists for long-form TTCW-based literary review generation. We address this gap by constructing a dataset of 263,911 long-form stories, each annotated with scalar scores and meta-synthesised review comments across 14 TTCW-based dimensions. Using this dataset, we fine-tune Qwen3 models at two scales, 4B and 8B, under two conditions: with and without reasoning content. Results show that non-reasoning fine-tuning achieves stronger and more stable performance, with the best setting reaching an evaluation score of 0.6820. Further analysis shows that reasoning-supervised models are more prone to parse failures, often continuing with irrelevant or repetitive reasoning-style text rather than completing the required 14-metric review report. These results suggest that, for fixed-format rubric-based review generation, reasoning supervision is not straightforwardly beneficial, and precise metric-aligned scoring remains challenging even after task-specific fine-tuning.
| Comments: | Submit to EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.20364 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.20364v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.20364 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Jinlong Liu [view email]
[v1]
Tue, 19 May 2026 18:16:58 UTC (222 KB)
— Originally published at arxiv.org
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