This paper introduces **EvolvingWorld**, a framework and benchmark for character and world co-evolution in interactive literary worlds. Existing systems either treat interactive literary simulation as static persona imitation or isolated scene generation, failing to capture how characters and worlds evolve together over time. To address this, EvolvingWorld models literary simulation as a long-horizon process where characters interact, scenes progress, and character and world states are persistently updated. Unlike prior systems relying on fixed schemas, EvolvingWorld adopts an open-schema framework to support simulation across diverse literary worlds. The framework consists of two coupled modules: a **Character Agent** for multi-character role-play and persistent profile evolution, and an LLM-based **World Model** for global and location/entity-level state maintenance and scene progression. Based on this architecture, we formulate 7 trainable tasks for scene initialization, interaction generation, and state update. We construct a dataset from 57 books, producing 138,596 supervised training samples and 222 snapshots for testing. Furthermore, we introduce a trajectory-level LLM-as-Judge evaluation protocol spanning 10 dimensions and 20 metrics. Experiments show that EvolvingWorld can improve long-horizon simulation by effectively maintaining persistent, coherent character and world development.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for writing economic analysis reports or providing financial advice, but their ability to understand economic knowledge and reason about potential results of specific economic events lacks systematic evaluation. To address this gap, we propose a new dataset, natural language inference on economic events (EconNLI), to evaluate LLMs’ knowledge and reasoning abilities in the economic domain. We evaluate LLMs on (1) their ability to correctly classify whether a premise event will cause a hypothesis event and (2) their ability to generate reasonable events resulting from a given premise. Our experiments reveal that LLMs are not sophisticated in economic reasoning and may generate wrong or hallucinated answers. Our study raises awareness of the limitations of using LLMs for critical decision-making involving economic reasoning and analysis. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/Irenehere/EconNLI.

Human-like biases and undesired social stereotypes exist in large pretrained language models. Given the wide adoption of these models in real-world applications, mitigating such biases has become an emerging and important task. In this paper, we propose an automatic method to mitigate the biases in pretrained language models. Different from previous debiasing work that uses external corpora to fine-tune the pretrained models, we instead directly probe the biases encoded in pretrained models through prompts. Specifically, we propose a variant of the beam search method to automatically search for biased prompts such that the cloze-style completions are the most different with respect to different demographic groups. Given the identified biased prompts, we then propose a distribution alignment loss to mitigate the biases. Experiment results on standard datasets and metrics show that our proposed Auto-Debias approach can significantly reduce biases, including gender and racial bias, in pretrained language models such as BERT, RoBERTa and ALBERT. Moreover, the improvement in fairness does not decrease the language models’ understanding abilities, as shown using the GLUE benchmark.