Coherence-Aware Distributional Evaluation of Open-Ended Text Generation

Abstract

Existing open-ended generation metrics measure likelihood, lexical diversity, or distributional similarity in generic representation space, yet can miss fundamental dimensions of quality. A prominent blind spot is global coherence: a generated passage may be locally fluent while remaining globally contradictory, causally inconsistent, or topically disconnected. We identify representation as a central bottleneck in detecting these failures and introduce CHORD (Coherence-aware Hidden-state Open-generation Reference Distance), a coherence-sensitive distributional metric. CHORD encodes generated and human-written corpora in the hidden-state space of a frozen LLM using a coherence-eliciting prompt, and compares the resulting distributions using RBF-MMD. To test coherence sensitivity and selectivity, we construct a counterfactual evaluation suite pairing graded coherence-degrading perturbations with meaning-preserving controls. CHORD selectively detects relation, discourse, structural, and mixture failures that perplexity, entropy, MAUVE, FBD, and MMD-based baselines either miss or cannot separate from benign rewriting. Factorial ablations show that representation is the primary source of coherence sensitivity, while RBF-MMD improves sample efficiency. Larger backbones capture finer-grained distinctions, but coherence prompting improves selectivity only when the backbone can follow the prompt. On unconditional generation and prefix continuation, CHORD yields model rankings that strongly align with human judgments of whether outputs make sense and appear human-written. Together, these results establish representation design as central to reliable distributional evaluation. Code: https://github.com/MAPS-research/CHORD. Experiments: https://github.com/MAPS-research/CHORD-Experiment.