AutiHero: Engaging Parents in Creating Personalized, Multi-path Social Narratives for Autistic Children

arXiv cs.CL / 4/6/2026

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Key Points

AutiHero is a generative AI-based system designed to help parents create personalized, multi-path social narratives for autistic children, targeting specific behaviors.
The system aims to reduce the heavy customization and repetitive instruction burden typically required for social narrative practice by enabling parents to generate and adapt story materials.
AutiHero supports shared reading experiences that let families explore behavioral choices and their causal consequences within the narratives.
A two-week deployment study with 16 autistic child-parent dyads found that parents actively created, adapted, and read stories, alongside increased confidence in providing everyday behavioral guidance.
The work highlights a real-world, user-aligned approach for generating sensitive text+image content in collaboration with parents rather than treating the output as one-size-fits-all.

Abstract

Social narratives help autistic children understand and navigate social situations through stories. To ensure effective practice, however, they often require significant time and effort from parents in customizing the narrative materials and delivering repeated instructions on them. We present AutiHero, a generative AI (GenAI)-based social narrative system, which supports parents to create personalized, multi-path stories targeting specific behavior of their autistic children, while enabling them to explore behavioral choices and causal consequences together in reading. A two-week deployment study with 16 autistic child-parent dyads showed that parents actively created, adapted, and read stories with their children, with increased confidence in everyday behavioral guidance. Our work contributes real-world-contextualized text+image content creation approaches harnessing GenAI, ensuring user-aligned application in sensitive contexts involving autistic children and their parents.