CreativeInstruct: A New Method to Counteract Creativity Collapse in Post-Trained LLMs

EliasEskin · x · 2026-08-11

Elias Eskin et al. introduced CreativeInstruct, a scalable post-training method designed to counteract the creativity collapse often seen in post-trained LLMs (8B-32B).

Mechanism: The approach teaches models to balance alignment and base-model-like creativity by injecting special [StartCreativity] spans during generation.

Metric: The team proposed LLM-Graph Edit Distance (GED), a new structural diversity metric to capture narrative-level variations missed by lexical metrics.

Results: CreativeInstruct improves semantic diversity in narrative generation while maintaining quality. It also serves as a better substrate for RL exploration, showing 4% improvement on OOD reasoning tasks compared to regular Instruct+RL.

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