{"paper":{"title":"Calibrated Surprise: An Information-Theoretic Account of Creative Quality","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"Creative quality is calibrated surprise: converging constraints shrink the space of choices until only low-probability options from an unconstrained view remain.","cross_cats":["cs.AI","cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Bo Zou, Chao Xu","submitted_at":"2026-04-29T03:53:31Z","abstract_excerpt":"In the era of large language models, creative writing quality lacks a computable theoretical anchor. The dominant approaches are rubric scoring -- decomposing holistic aesthetic judgment into sub-scores -- and RLHF preference signals -- replacing quality with group votes. Both bypass the statistical structure of the text itself. This paper provides an information-theoretic foundation to fill this gap.\n  We propose 'calibrated surprise' as the information-theoretic essence of excellent creative writing. This judgment matches reading intuition and covers its opposite.\n  This literary judgment ad"},"claims":{"count":4,"items":[{"kind":"strongest_claim","text":"A mathematical corollary follows: full-dimensional accuracy and mediocrity are mutually exclusive -- two sides of one constraint structure, not separate goals.","source":"verdict.strongest_claim","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C1","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"weakest_assumption","text":"The author's intent, the reader's reasonable expectation, and the logic of reality act as independent constraints that can be jointly imposed to force the admissible set of writing choices into a narrow region whose size is directly captured by conditional entropy approaching zero.","source":"verdict.weakest_assumption","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C2","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"one_line_summary","text":"Creative writing quality is calibrated surprise: joint constraints collapse the solution space so surviving choices have high entropy but near-zero conditional entropy, measured by mutual information.","source":"verdict.one_line_summary","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C3","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"headline","text":"Creative quality is calibrated surprise: converging constraints shrink the space of choices until only low-probability options from an unconstrained view remain.","source":"verdict.pith_extraction.headline","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C4","attestation":"unclaimed"}],"snapshot_sha256":"a04734f55ff7f1bf23524c0acf8f2240a0d8b1855a7c1be20b6a9ff111bf58eb"},"source":{"id":"2604.26269","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":"25066128-e285-4ea7-8878-c0728fd796bd","model_set":{"reader":"grok-4.3"},"created_at":"2026-05-07T13:08:48.526860Z","strongest_claim":"A mathematical corollary follows: full-dimensional accuracy and mediocrity are mutually exclusive -- two sides of one constraint structure, not separate goals.","one_line_summary":"Creative writing quality is calibrated surprise: joint constraints collapse the solution space so surviving choices have high entropy but near-zero conditional entropy, measured by mutual information.","pipeline_version":"pith-pipeline@v0.9.0","weakest_assumption":"The author's intent, the reader's reasonable expectation, and the logic of reality act as independent constraints that can be jointly imposed to force the admissible set of writing choices into a narrow region whose size is directly captured by conditional entropy approaching zero.","pith_extraction_headline":"Creative quality is calibrated surprise: converging constraints shrink the space of choices until only low-probability options from an unconstrained view remain."},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2604.26269/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[{"name":"ai_meta_artifact","ran_at":"2026-05-21T00:39:40.855440Z","status":"completed","version":"1.0.0","findings_count":0},{"name":"doi_compliance","ran_at":"2026-05-19T20:22:50.223993Z","status":"completed","version":"1.0.0","findings_count":0}],"snapshot_sha256":"90ebbfa53aee0a30ef87f4b5f04fce3f9a6b9dd14417338ba5f97d8c00cc8cf6"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}