Pastiche Novel Generation Creating: Fan Fiction You Love in Your Favorite Author's Style

Great novels create immersive worlds with rich character arcs, well-structured plots, and nuanced writing styles. However, current novel generation methods often rely on brief, simplistic story outlines and generate details using plain, generic language. To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of Pastiche Novel Generation, which requires the generated novels to imitate the distinctive features of the original work, including understanding character profiles, predicting plausible plot developments, and writing concrete details using vivid, expressive language. To achieve this, we propose WriterAgent, a novel generation system designed to master the core aspects of literary pastiche. WriterAgent is trained through a curriculum learning paradigm, progressing from low-level stylistic mastery to high-level narrative coherence. Its key tasks include language style learning, character modeling, plot planning, and stylish writing, ensuring comprehensive narrative control. To support this, WriterAgent leverages the WriterLoRA framework, an extension of LoRA with hierarchical and cumulative task-specific modules, each specializing in a different narrative aspect. We evaluate WriterAgent on multilingual classics like Harry Potter and Dream of the Red Chamber, demonstrating its superiority over baselines in capturing the target author's settings, character dynamics, and writing style to produce coherent, faithful narratives.

A Model-Agnostic Causal Learning Framework for Recommendation using Search Data

Machine-learning based recommender systems(RSs) has become an effective means to help people automatically discover their interests. Existing models often represent the rich information for recommendation, such as items, users, and contexts, as embedding vectors and leverage them to predict users' feedback. In the view of causal analysis, the associations between these embedding vectors and users' feedback are a mixture of the causal part that describes why an item is preferred by a user, and the non-causal part that merely reflects the statistical dependencies between users and items, for example, the exposure mechanism, public opinions, display position, etc. However, existing RSs mostly ignored the striking differences between the causal parts and non-causal parts when using these embedding vectors. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic framework named IV4Rec that can effectively decompose the embedding vectors into these two parts, hence enhancing recommendation results. Specifically, we jointly consider users' behaviors in search scenarios and recommendation scenarios. Adopting the concepts in causal analysis, we embed users' search behaviors as instrumental variables (IVs), to help decompose original embedding vectors in recommendation, i.e., treatments. IV4Rec then combines the two parts through deep neural networks and uses the combined results for recommendation. IV4Rec is model-agnostic and can be applied to a number of existing RSs such as DIN and NRHUB. Experimental results on both public and proprietary industrial datasets demonstrate that IV4Rec consistently enhances RSs and outperforms a framework that jointly considers search and recommendation.