Text-to-Stage: Spatial Layouts from Long-form Narratives
Jefferson Hernandez, Swarnadeep Saha, Chenxi Whitehouse, Sanjeel Parekh, Calvin Murdock, Yuliang Li, W. Owen Brimijoin, Vamsi Krishna Ithapu, Ishwarya Ananthabhotla · Mar 18, 2026 · Citations: 0
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Abstract
In this work, we probe the ability of a language model to demonstrate spatial reasoning from unstructured text, mimicking human capabilities and automating a process that benefits many downstream media applications. Concretely, we study the narrative-to-play task: inferring stage-play layouts (scenes, speaker positions, movements, and room types) from text that lacks explicit spatial, positional, or relational cues. We then introduce a dramaturgy-inspired deterministic evaluation suite and, finally, a training and inference recipe that combines rejection SFT using Best-of-N sampling with RL from verifiable rewards via GRPO. Experiments on a text-only corpus of classical English literature demonstrate improvements over vanilla models across multiple metrics (character attribution, spatial plausibility, and movement economy), as well as alignment with an LLM-as-a-judge and subjective human preferences.