Daily Papers

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is crucial for college students navigating increased academic demands and independence. Insufficient SRL skills can lead to disorganized study habits, low motivation, and poor time management, undermining learners ability to thrive in challenging environments. Through a formative study involving 59 college students, we identified key challenges students face in developing SRL skills, including difficulties with goal-setting, time management, and reflective learning. To address these challenges, we introduce SRLAgent, an LLM-assisted system that fosters SRL skills through gamification and adaptive support from large language models (LLMs). Grounded in Zimmermans three-phase SRL framework, SRLAgent enables students to engage in goal-setting, strategy execution, and self-reflection within an interactive game-based environment. The system offers real-time feedback and scaffolding powered by LLMs to support students independent study efforts. We evaluated SRLAgent using a between-subjects design, comparing it to a baseline system (SRL without Agent features) and a traditional multimedia learning condition. Results showed significant improvements in SRL skills within the SRLAgent group (p < .001, Cohens d = 0.234) and higher engagement compared to the baselines. This work highlights the value of embedding SRL scaffolding and real-time AI support within gamified environments, offering design implications for educational technologies that aim to promote deeper learning and metacognitive skill development.

The progress in generative AI has fueled AI-powered tools like co-pilots and assistants to provision better guidance, particularly during data analysis. However, research on guidance has not yet examined the perceived efficacy of the source from which guidance is offered and the impact of this source on the user's perception and usage of guidance. We ask whether users perceive all guidance sources as equal, with particular interest in three sources: (i) AI, (ii) human expert, and (iii) a group of human analysts. As a benchmark, we consider a fourth source, (iv) unattributed guidance, where guidance is provided without attribution to any source, enabling isolation of and comparison with the effects of source-specific guidance. We design a five-condition between-subjects study, with one condition for each of the four guidance sources and an additional (v) no-guidance condition, which serves as a baseline to evaluate the influence of any kind of guidance. We situate our study in a custom data preparation and analysis tool wherein we task users to select relevant attributes from an unfamiliar dataset to inform a business report. Depending on the assigned condition, users can request guidance, which the system then provides in the form of attribute suggestions. To ensure internal validity, we control for the quality of guidance across source-conditions. Through several metrics of usage and perception, we statistically test five preregistered hypotheses and report on additional analysis. We find that the source of guidance matters to users, but not in a manner that matches received wisdom. For instance, users utilize guidance differently at various stages of analysis, including expressing varying levels of regret, despite receiving guidance of similar quality. Notably, users in the AI condition reported both higher post-task benefit and regret.

Social cues, which convey others' presence, behaviors, or identities, play a crucial role in human information seeking by helping individuals judge relevance and trustworthiness. However, existing LLM-based search systems primarily rely on semantic features, creating a misalignment with the socialized cognition underlying natural information seeking. To address this gap, we explore how the integration of social cues into LLM-based search influences users' perceptions, experiences, and behaviors. Focusing on social media platforms that are beginning to adopt LLM-based search, we integrate design workshops, the implementation of the prototype system (SoulSeek), a between-subjects study, and mixed-method analyses to examine both outcome- and process-level findings. The workshop informs the prototype's cue-integrated design. The study shows that social cues improve perceived outcomes and experiences, promote reflective information behaviors, and reveal limits of current LLM-based search. We propose design implications emphasizing better social-knowledge understanding, personalized cue settings, and controllable interactions.

With the rapid progress of video generation, demand for customized video editing is surging, where subject swapping constitutes a key component yet remains under-explored. Prevailing swapping approaches either specialize in narrow domains--such as human-body animation or hand-object interaction--or rely on some indirect editing paradigm or ambiguous text prompts that compromise final fidelity. In this paper, we propose DreamSwapV, a mask-guided, subject-agnostic, end-to-end framework that swaps any subject in any video for customization with a user-specified mask and reference image. To inject fine-grained guidance, we introduce multiple conditions and a dedicated condition fusion module that integrates them efficiently. In addition, an adaptive mask strategy is designed to accommodate subjects of varying scales and attributes, further improving interactions between the swapped subject and its surrounding context. Through our elaborate two-phase dataset construction and training scheme, our DreamSwapV outperforms existing methods, as validated by comprehensive experiments on VBench indicators and our first introduced DreamSwapV-Benchmark.

Despite recent advances in video generation, existing models still lack fine-grained controllability, especially for multi-subject customization with consistent identity and interaction. In this paper, we propose PolyVivid, a multi-subject video customization framework that enables flexible and identity-consistent generation. To establish accurate correspondences between subject images and textual entities, we design a VLLM-based text-image fusion module that embeds visual identities into the textual space for precise grounding. To further enhance identity preservation and subject interaction, we propose a 3D-RoPE-based enhancement module that enables structured bidirectional fusion between text and image embeddings. Moreover, we develop an attention-inherited identity injection module to effectively inject fused identity features into the video generation process, mitigating identity drift. Finally, we construct an MLLM-based data pipeline that combines MLLM-based grounding, segmentation, and a clique-based subject consolidation strategy to produce high-quality multi-subject data, effectively enhancing subject distinction and reducing ambiguity in downstream video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PolyVivid achieves superior performance in identity fidelity, video realism, and subject alignment, outperforming existing open-source and commercial baselines.

Recent advances in customized video generation have enabled users to create videos tailored to both specific subjects and motion trajectories. However, existing methods often require complicated test-time fine-tuning and struggle with balancing subject learning and motion control, limiting their real-world applications. In this paper, we present DreamVideo-2, a zero-shot video customization framework capable of generating videos with a specific subject and motion trajectory, guided by a single image and a bounding box sequence, respectively, and without the need for test-time fine-tuning. Specifically, we introduce reference attention, which leverages the model's inherent capabilities for subject learning, and devise a mask-guided motion module to achieve precise motion control by fully utilizing the robust motion signal of box masks derived from bounding boxes. While these two components achieve their intended functions, we empirically observe that motion control tends to dominate over subject learning. To address this, we propose two key designs: 1) the masked reference attention, which integrates a blended latent mask modeling scheme into reference attention to enhance subject representations at the desired positions, and 2) a reweighted diffusion loss, which differentiates the contributions of regions inside and outside the bounding boxes to ensure a balance between subject and motion control. Extensive experimental results on a newly curated dataset demonstrate that DreamVideo-2 outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both subject customization and motion control. The dataset, code, and models will be made publicly available.

Recent entity and relation extraction works focus on investigating how to obtain a better span representation from the pre-trained encoder. However, a major limitation of existing works is that they ignore the interrelation between spans (pairs). In this work, we propose a novel span representation approach, named Packed Levitated Markers (PL-Marker), to consider the interrelation between the spans (pairs) by strategically packing the markers in the encoder. In particular, we propose a neighborhood-oriented packing strategy, which considers the neighbor spans integrally to better model the entity boundary information. Furthermore, for those more complicated span pair classification tasks, we design a subject-oriented packing strategy, which packs each subject and all its objects to model the interrelation between the same-subject span pairs. The experimental results show that, with the enhanced marker feature, our model advances baselines on six NER benchmarks, and obtains a 4.1%-4.3% strict relation F1 improvement with higher speed over previous state-of-the-art models on ACE04 and ACE05.

Multi-subject customization aims to synthesize multiple user-specified subjects into a coherent image. To address issues such as subjects missing or conflicts, recent works incorporate layout guidance to provide explicit spatial constraints. However, existing methods still struggle to balance three critical objectives: text alignment, subject identity preservation, and layout control, while the reliance on additional training further limits their scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we present AnyMS, a novel training-free framework for layout-guided multi-subject customization. AnyMS leverages three input conditions: text prompt, subject images, and layout constraints, and introduces a bottom-up dual-level attention decoupling mechanism to harmonize their integration during generation. Specifically, global decoupling separates cross-attention between textual and visual conditions to ensure text alignment. Local decoupling confines each subject's attention to its designated area, which prevents subject conflicts and thus guarantees identity preservation and layout control. Moreover, AnyMS employs pre-trained image adapters to extract subject-specific features aligned with the diffusion model, removing the need for subject learning or adapter tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnyMS achieves state-of-the-art performance, supporting complex compositions and scaling to a larger number of subjects.

Synthesizing images with user-specified subjects has received growing attention due to its practical applications. Despite the recent success in single subject customization, existing algorithms suffer from high training cost and low success rate along with increased number of subjects. Towards controllable image synthesis with multiple subjects as the constraints, this work studies how to efficiently represent a particular subject as well as how to appropriately compose different subjects. We find that the text embedding regarding the subject token already serves as a simple yet effective representation that supports arbitrary combinations without any model tuning. Through learning a residual on top of the base embedding, we manage to robustly shift the raw subject to the customized subject given various text conditions. We then propose to employ layout, a very abstract and easy-to-obtain prior, as the spatial guidance for subject arrangement. By rectifying the activations in the cross-attention map, the layout appoints and separates the location of different subjects in the image, significantly alleviating the interference across them. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate our superiority over state-of-the-art alternatives under a variety of settings for multi-subject customization.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation models have dramatically enhanced the generation of photorealistic images from textual prompts, leading to an increased interest in personalized text-to-image applications, particularly in multi-subject scenarios. However, these advances are hindered by two main challenges: firstly, the need to accurately maintain the details of each referenced subject in accordance with the textual descriptions; and secondly, the difficulty in achieving a cohesive representation of multiple subjects in a single image without introducing inconsistencies. To address these concerns, our research introduces the MS-Diffusion framework for layout-guided zero-shot image personalization with multi-subjects. This innovative approach integrates grounding tokens with the feature resampler to maintain detail fidelity among subjects. With the layout guidance, MS-Diffusion further improves the cross-attention to adapt to the multi-subject inputs, ensuring that each subject condition acts on specific areas. The proposed multi-subject cross-attention orchestrates harmonious inter-subject compositions while preserving the control of texts. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments affirm that this method surpasses existing models in both image and text fidelity, promoting the development of personalized text-to-image generation.

Current multi-subject customization approaches encounter two critical challenges: the difficulty in acquiring diverse multi-subject training data, and attribute entanglement across different subjects. To bridge these gaps, we propose MUSAR - a simple yet effective framework to achieve robust multi-subject customization while requiring only single-subject training data. Firstly, to break the data limitation, we introduce debiased diptych learning. It constructs diptych training pairs from single-subject images to facilitate multi-subject learning, while actively correcting the distribution bias introduced by diptych construction via static attention routing and dual-branch LoRA. Secondly, to eliminate cross-subject entanglement, we introduce dynamic attention routing mechanism, which adaptively establishes bijective mappings between generated images and conditional subjects. This design not only achieves decoupling of multi-subject representations but also maintains scalable generalization performance with increasing reference subjects. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our MUSAR outperforms existing methods - even those trained on multi-subject dataset - in image quality, subject consistency, and interaction naturalness, despite requiring only single-subject dataset.

Subject-driven and multi-element video generation are central to controllable video synthesis, but existing methods still struggle to preserve identity consistency and model complex relationships among multiple subjects. In this paper, we propose Aura, a unified framework for high-fidelity and identity-consistent video generation. To better capture scene dynamics and subject interactions, we introduce AI director-level captions that provide dense and structured descriptions of video content. We further leverage a vision-language model (VLM) with learnable queries to extract multimodal semantic features from textual and visual references, covering both global semantics and fine-grained visual cues. To bridge the representational gap between the VLM and the Diffusion Transformer (DiT), we design a two-stage alignment strategy that progressively maps VLM features into the DiT feature space. For visual conditioning, we adopt token concatenation to inject reference information directly into the generation process. To distinguish heterogeneous subject types and reduce common copy-paste artifacts, we develop a subject-aware RoPE-Shift mechanism. To further differentiate reference images of different categories, we introduce subject-aware learnable tokens. In addition, we introduce Memory Tokens to balance the training signal across examples with different numbers of reference subjects. During inference, Progressive-APG (Adaptive Prompt Guidance) further alleviates oversaturation and improves semantic alignment with user prompts. Finally, we build a high-quality video-subject image dataset through a dedicated data construction pipeline. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both single-subject generation and more challenging multi-element scenarios.

As cutting-edge Text-to-Image (T2I) generation models already excel at producing remarkable single images, an even more challenging task, i.e., multi-turn interactive image generation begins to attract the attention of related research communities. This task requires models to interact with users over multiple turns to generate a coherent sequence of images. However, since users may switch subjects frequently, current efforts struggle to maintain subject consistency while generating diverse images. To address this issue, we introduce a training-free multi-agent framework called AutoStudio. AutoStudio employs three agents based on large language models (LLMs) to handle interactions, along with a stable diffusion (SD) based agent for generating high-quality images. Specifically, AutoStudio consists of (i) a subject manager to interpret interaction dialogues and manage the context of each subject, (ii) a layout generator to generate fine-grained bounding boxes to control subject locations, (iii) a supervisor to provide suggestions for layout refinements, and (iv) a drawer to complete image generation. Furthermore, we introduce a Parallel-UNet to replace the original UNet in the drawer, which employs two parallel cross-attention modules for exploiting subject-aware features. We also introduce a subject-initialized generation method to better preserve small subjects. Our AutoStudio hereby can generate a sequence of multi-subject images interactively and consistently. Extensive experiments on the public CMIGBench benchmark and human evaluations show that AutoStudio maintains multi-subject consistency across multiple turns well, and it also raises the state-of-the-art performance by 13.65% in average Frechet Inception Distance and 2.83% in average character-character similarity.

Graphic design plays a vital role in visual communication across advertising, marketing, and multimedia entertainment. Prior work has explored automated graphic design generation using diffusion models, aiming to streamline creative workflows and democratize design capabilities. However, complex graphic design scenarios require accurately adhering to design intent specified by multiple heterogeneous user-provided elements (\eg images, layouts, and texts), which pose multi-condition control challenges for existing methods. Specifically, previous single-condition control models demonstrate effectiveness only within their specialized domains but fail to generalize to other conditions, while existing multi-condition methods often lack fine-grained control over each sub-condition and compromise overall compositional harmony. To address these limitations, we introduce CreatiDesign, a systematic solution for automated graphic design covering both model architecture and dataset construction. First, we design a unified multi-condition driven architecture that enables flexible and precise integration of heterogeneous design elements with minimal architectural modifications to the base diffusion model. Furthermore, to ensure that each condition precisely controls its designated image region and to avoid interference between conditions, we propose a multimodal attention mask mechanism. Additionally, we develop a fully automated pipeline for constructing graphic design datasets, and introduce a new dataset with 400K samples featuring multi-condition annotations, along with a comprehensive benchmark. Experimental results show that CreatiDesign outperforms existing models by a clear margin in faithfully adhering to user intent.

Multi-subject personalized generation presents unique challenges in maintaining identity fidelity and semantic coherence when synthesizing images conditioned on multiple reference subjects. Existing methods often suffer from identity blending and attribute leakage due to inadequate modeling of how different subjects should interact within shared representation spaces. We present MOSAIC, a representation-centric framework that rethinks multi-subject generation through explicit semantic correspondence and orthogonal feature disentanglement. Our key insight is that multi-subject generation requires precise semantic alignment at the representation level - knowing exactly which regions in the generated image should attend to which parts of each reference. To enable this, we introduce SemAlign-MS, a meticulously annotated dataset providing fine-grained semantic correspondences between multiple reference subjects and target images, previously unavailable in this domain. Building on this foundation, we propose the semantic correspondence attention loss to enforce precise point-to-point semantic alignment, ensuring high consistency from each reference to its designated regions. Furthermore, we develop the multi-reference disentanglement loss to push different subjects into orthogonal attention subspaces, preventing feature interference while preserving individual identity characteristics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MOSAIC achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. Notably, while existing methods typically degrade beyond 3 subjects, MOSAIC maintains high fidelity with 4+ reference subjects, opening new possibilities for complex multi-subject synthesis applications.

Generative models, such as large language models and text-to-image diffusion models, are increasingly used to create visual designs like user interfaces (UIs) and presentation slides. Finetuning and benchmarking these generative models have often relied on datasets of human-annotated design preferences. Yet, due to the subjective and highly personalized nature of visual design, preference varies widely among individuals. In this paper, we study this problem by introducing DesignPref, a dataset of 12k pairwise comparisons of UI design generation annotated by 20 professional designers with multi-level preference ratings. We found that among trained designers, substantial levels of disagreement exist (Krippendorff's alpha = 0.25 for binary preferences). Natural language rationales provided by these designers indicate that disagreements stem from differing perceptions of various design aspect importance and individual preferences. With DesignPref, we demonstrate that traditional majority-voting methods for training aggregated judge models often do not accurately reflect individual preferences. To address this challenge, we investigate multiple personalization strategies, particularly fine-tuning or incorporating designer-specific annotations into RAG pipelines. Our results show that personalized models consistently outperform aggregated baseline models in predicting individual designers' preferences, even when using 20 times fewer examples. Our work provides the first dataset to study personalized visual design evaluation and support future research into modeling individual design taste.

Existing text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality images guided by textual prompts. However, achieving multi-subject compositional synthesis with precise spatial control remains a significant challenge. In this work, we address the task of layout-controllable multi-subject synthesis (LMS), which requires both faithful reconstruction of reference subjects and their accurate placement in specified regions within a unified image. While recent advancements have separately improved layout control and subject synthesis, existing approaches struggle to simultaneously satisfy the dual requirements of spatial precision and identity preservation in this composite task. To bridge this gap, we propose MUSE, a unified synthesis framework that employs concatenated cross-attention (CCA) to seamlessly integrate layout specifications with textual guidance through explicit semantic space expansion. The proposed CCA mechanism enables bidirectional modality alignment between spatial constraints and textual descriptions without interference. Furthermore, we design a progressive two-stage training strategy that decomposes the LMS task into learnable sub-objectives for effective optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MUSE achieves zero-shot end-to-end generation with superior spatial accuracy and identity consistency compared to existing solutions, advancing the frontier of controllable image synthesis. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/pf0607/MUSE.

Foreground-conditioned inpainting aims to seamlessly fill the background region of an image by utilizing the provided foreground subject and a text description. While existing T2I-based image inpainting methods can be applied to this task, they suffer from issues of subject shape expansion, distortion, or impaired ability to align with the text description, resulting in inconsistencies between the visual elements and the text description. To address these challenges, we propose Pinco, a plug-and-play foreground-conditioned inpainting adapter that generates high-quality backgrounds with good text alignment while effectively preserving the shape of the foreground subject. Firstly, we design a Self-Consistent Adapter that integrates the foreground subject features into the layout-related self-attention layer, which helps to alleviate conflicts between the text and subject features by ensuring that the model can effectively consider the foreground subject's characteristics while processing the overall image layout. Secondly, we design a Decoupled Image Feature Extraction method that employs distinct architectures to extract semantic and shape features separately, significantly improving subject feature extraction and ensuring high-quality preservation of the subject's shape. Thirdly, to ensure precise utilization of the extracted features and to focus attention on the subject region, we introduce a Shared Positional Embedding Anchor, greatly improving the model's understanding of subject features and boosting training efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance and efficiency in foreground-conditioned inpainting.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provide a simpleframework for learning world models by predicting future latent representations.However, JEPA training is subject to a bias-variance tradeoff.Without sufficient structural constraints, excessive representationalvariance causes the model to collapse to trivial solutions.The recent LeWorldModel (LeWM) shows that this issue can be alleviated bysimply constraining latent embeddings with an isotropic Gaussian prior.However, latent representations inherently lie on low-dimensional manifoldswithin a high-dimensional ambient space, and enforcing an isotropic Gaussianprior directly in this ambient space introduces an overly strong bias.In this work, we propose ame, which seeks a favorable operatingpoint on the bias-variance frontier by applying Gaussian constraints inmultiple random subspaces rather than in the originalembedding space.This design relaxes the global constraint while preserving itsanti-collapse effect, leading to a better balance between trainingstability and representation flexibility.Extensive experiments across fourcontinuous-control environments demonstrate that consistentlyoutperforms LeWM with very clear margins.Our method is simple yet effective, and serves as a strong baseline for future JEPA-based world model research.fdefinedeeemodeThe code is available at https://github.com/intcomp/Sub-JEPA.

Text-to-image models now generate graphic design at production scale, yet their supervision still comes primarily from photo-style preference datasets with a single overall verdict per comparison. Designers evaluate designs along several distinct axes (e.g., typography, layout, color harmony) that a single preference label collapses. We release TASTE (Typography, Aesthetics, Spatial, Tone, Etc.), a multi-dimensional preference dataset in which two disjoint cohorts of five professional designers each ranked outputs from four current text-to-image models across nine criteria along with per-image hallucination flags. We pair the dataset with two contributions. First, a criterion-agnostic signal-validation framework based on Kendall's τ, majority-vote probability, and Condorcet cycles against exact iid-uniform nulls; the analysis reveals significant but moderate designer agreement, with every TASTE criterion rejecting the random-rater null. Second, we benchmark preference models on TASTE and find that off-the-shelf VLM judges and dedicated T2I scorers fail to reach majority agreement with the designer panel, while a small MLP head trained directly on TASTE substantially narrows the gap to the single-rater ceiling, setting a baseline for future TASTE-trained preference models.

Personalized generation models for a single subject have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness, highlighting their significant potential. However, when extended to multiple subjects, existing models often exhibit degraded performance, particularly in maintaining subject consistency and adhering to textual prompts. We attribute these limitations to the absence of high-quality multi-subject datasets and refined post-training strategies. To address these challenges, we propose a scalable multi-subject data generation pipeline that leverages powerful single-subject generation models to construct diverse and high-quality multi-subject training data. Through this dataset, we first enable single-subject personalization models to acquire knowledge of synthesizing multi-image and multi-subject scenarios. Furthermore, to enhance both subject consistency and text controllability, we design a set of Pairwise Subject-Consistency Rewards and general-purpose rewards, which are incorporated into a refined reinforcement learning stage. To comprehensively evaluate multi-subject personalization, we introduce a new benchmark that assesses model performance using seven subsets across three dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in advancing multi-subject personalized image generation. Github Link: https://github.com/wang-shulei/PSR

Graphic designs are an effective medium for visual communication. They range from greeting cards to corporate flyers and beyond. Off-late, machine learning techniques are able to generate such designs, which accelerates the rate of content production. An automated way of evaluating their quality becomes critical. Towards this end, we introduce Design-o-meter, a data-driven methodology to quantify the goodness of graphic designs. Further, our approach can suggest modifications to these designs to improve its visual appeal. To the best of our knowledge, Design-o-meter is the first approach that scores and refines designs in a unified framework despite the inherent subjectivity and ambiguity of the setting. Our exhaustive quantitative and qualitative analysis of our approach against baselines adapted for the task (including recent Multimodal LLM-based approaches) brings out the efficacy of our methodology. We hope our work will usher more interest in this important and pragmatic problem setting.

Subject-driven image generation is increasingly expected to support fine-grained control over multiple entities within a single image. In multi-reference workflows, users may provide several subject images, a background reference, and long, entity-indexed prompts to control multiple people within one scene. In this setting, a key failure mode is cross-subject attribute misbinding: attributes are preserved, edited, or transferred to the wrong subject. Existing benchmarks and metrics largely emphasize holistic fidelity or per-subject self-similarity, making such failures hard to diagnose. We introduce MultiBind, a benchmark built from real multi-person photographs. Each instance provides slot-ordered subject crops with masks and bounding boxes, canonicalized subject references, an inpainted background reference, and a dense entity-indexed prompt derived from structured annotations. We also propose a dimension-wise confusion evaluation protocol that matches generated subjects to ground-truth slots and measures slot-to-slot similarity using specialists for face identity, appearance, pose, and expression. By subtracting the corresponding ground-truth similarity matrices, our method separates self-degradation from true cross-subject interference and exposes interpretable failure patterns such as drift, swap, dominance, and blending. Experiments on modern multi-reference generators show that MultiBind reveals binding failures that conventional reconstruction metrics miss.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate into our social and economic interactions, we need to deepen our understanding of how humans respond to LLMs opponents in strategic settings. We present the results of the first controlled monetarily-incentivised laboratory experiment looking at differences in human behaviour in a multi-player p-beauty contest against other humans and LLMs. We use a within-subject design in order to compare behaviour at the individual level. We show that, in this environment, human subjects choose significantly lower numbers when playing against LLMs than humans, which is mainly driven by the increased prevalence of `zero' Nash-equilibrium choices. This shift is mainly driven by subjects with high strategic reasoning ability. Subjects who play the zero Nash-equilibrium choice motivate their strategy by appealing to perceived LLM's reasoning ability and, unexpectedly, propensity towards cooperation. Our findings provide foundational insights into the multi-player human-LLM interaction in simultaneous choice games, uncover heterogeneities in both subjects' behaviour and beliefs about LLM's play when playing against them, and suggest important implications for mechanism design in mixed human-LLM systems.

Recently, large-scale generative models have demonstrated outstanding text-to-image generation capabilities. However, generating high-fidelity personalized images with specific subjects still presents challenges, especially in cases involving multiple subjects. In this paper, we propose AnyStory, a unified approach for personalized subject generation. AnyStory not only achieves high-fidelity personalization for single subjects, but also for multiple subjects, without sacrificing subject fidelity. Specifically, AnyStory models the subject personalization problem in an "encode-then-route" manner. In the encoding step, AnyStory utilizes a universal and powerful image encoder, i.e., ReferenceNet, in conjunction with CLIP vision encoder to achieve high-fidelity encoding of subject features. In the routing step, AnyStory utilizes a decoupled instance-aware subject router to accurately perceive and predict the potential location of the corresponding subject in the latent space, and guide the injection of subject conditions. Detailed experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of our method in retaining subject details, aligning text descriptions, and personalizing for multiple subjects. The project page is at https://aigcdesigngroup.github.io/AnyStory/ .

Although subject-driven generation has been extensively explored in image generation due to its wide applications, it still has challenges in data scalability and subject expansibility. For the first challenge, moving from curating single-subject datasets to multiple-subject ones and scaling them is particularly difficult. For the second, most recent methods center on single-subject generation, making it hard to apply when dealing with multi-subject scenarios. In this study, we propose a highly-consistent data synthesis pipeline to tackle this challenge. This pipeline harnesses the intrinsic in-context generation capabilities of diffusion transformers and generates high-consistency multi-subject paired data. Additionally, we introduce UNO, which consists of progressive cross-modal alignment and universal rotary position embedding. It is a multi-image conditioned subject-to-image model iteratively trained from a text-to-image model. Extensive experiments show that our method can achieve high consistency while ensuring controllability in both single-subject and multi-subject driven generation.

Content creators often aim to create personalized images using personal subjects that go beyond the capabilities of conventional text-to-image models. Additionally, they may want the resulting image to encompass a specific location, style, ambiance, and more. Existing personalization methods may compromise personalization ability or the alignment to complex textual prompts. This trade-off can impede the fulfillment of user prompts and subject fidelity. We propose a new approach focusing on personalization methods for a single prompt to address this issue. We term our approach prompt-aligned personalization. While this may seem restrictive, our method excels in improving text alignment, enabling the creation of images with complex and intricate prompts, which may pose a challenge for current techniques. In particular, our method keeps the personalized model aligned with a target prompt using an additional score distillation sampling term. We demonstrate the versatility of our method in multi- and single-shot settings and further show that it can compose multiple subjects or use inspiration from reference images, such as artworks. We compare our approach quantitatively and qualitatively with existing baselines and state-of-the-art techniques.

Multi-subject image generation aims to synthesize user-provided subjects in a single image while preserving subject fidelity, ensuring prompt consistency, and aligning with human aesthetic preferences. However, existing methods, particularly those built on the In-Context-Learning paradigm, are limited by their reliance on simple reconstruction-based objectives, leading to both severe attribute leakage that compromises subject fidelity and failing to align with nuanced human preferences. To address this, we propose MultiCrafter, a framework that ensures high-fidelity, preference-aligned generation. First, we find that the root cause of attribute leakage is a significant entanglement of attention between different subjects during the generation process. Therefore, we introduce explicit positional supervision to explicitly separate attention regions for each subject, effectively mitigating attribute leakage. To enable the model to accurately plan the attention region of different subjects in diverse scenarios, we employ a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to enhance the model's capacity, allowing different experts to focus on different scenarios. Finally, we design a novel online reinforcement learning framework to align the model with human preferences, featuring a scoring mechanism to accurately assess multi-subject fidelity and a more stable training strategy tailored for the MoE architecture. Experiments validate that our framework significantly improves subject fidelity while aligning with human preferences better.

Graphic layouts serve as an important and engaging medium for visual communication across different channels. While recent layout generation models have demonstrated impressive capabilities, they frequently fail to align with nuanced human aesthetic judgment. Existing preference datasets and reward models trained on text-to-image generation do not generalize to layout evaluation, where the spatial arrangement of identical elements determines quality. To address this critical gap, we introduce DesignSense-10k, a large-scale dataset of 10,235 human-annotated preference pairs for graphic layout evaluation. We propose a five-stage curation pipeline that generates visually coherent layout transformations across diverse aspect ratios, using semantic grouping, layout prediction, filtering, clustering, and VLM-based refinement to produce high-quality comparison pairs. Human preferences are annotated using a 4-class scheme (left, right, both good, both bad) to capture subjective ambiguity. Leveraging this dataset, we train DesignSense, a vision-language model-based classifier that substantially outperforms existing open-source and proprietary models across comprehensive evaluation metrics (54.6% improvement in Macro F1 over the strongest proprietary baseline). Our analysis shows that frontier VLMs remain unreliable overall and fail catastrophically on the full four-class task, underscoring the need for specialized, preference-aware models. Beyond the dataset, our reward model DesignSense yields tangible downstream gains in layout generation. Using our judge during RL based training improves generator win rate by about 3%, while inference-time scaling, which involves generating multiple candidates and selecting the best one, provides a 3.6% improvement. These results highlight the practical impact of specialized, layout-aware preference modeling on real-world layout generation quality.

Text-to-image models offer a new level of creative flexibility by allowing users to guide the image generation process through natural language. However, using these models to consistently portray the same subject across diverse prompts remains challenging. Existing approaches fine-tune the model to teach it new words that describe specific user-provided subjects or add image conditioning to the model. These methods require lengthy per-subject optimization or large-scale pre-training. Moreover, they struggle to align generated images with text prompts and face difficulties in portraying multiple subjects. Here, we present ConsiStory, a training-free approach that enables consistent subject generation by sharing the internal activations of the pretrained model. We introduce a subject-driven shared attention block and correspondence-based feature injection to promote subject consistency between images. Additionally, we develop strategies to encourage layout diversity while maintaining subject consistency. We compare ConsiStory to a range of baselines, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on subject consistency and text alignment, without requiring a single optimization step. Finally, ConsiStory can naturally extend to multi-subject scenarios, and even enable training-free personalization for common objects.

LLMs are increasingly used to brainstorm research ideas, but existing evaluations mostly judge individual ideas by novelty, feasibility, or expert preference. We instead ask: how far are current LLM-generated ideas from human researchers? To characterize this gap, we build a large-scale evaluation framework for ideation from high-quality human research papers. For each paper, we reverse-engineer a small set of closely related prior works that likely inspired its core idea. LLMs are then prompted to generate a new idea from the set of paper titles and summaries. We introduce a two-axis research-taste taxonomy to profile each idea by its opportunity pattern and research paradigm, and use it to quantify the divergence between human and LLM ideas. Across idea sets generated by different LLMs, we observe a consistent distributional gap: LLM ideas are disproportionately concentrated around bridge-like opportunities and synthesis methods, whereas the human paper reference distribution spreads more broadly across ways of framing gaps and constructing contributions. This result suggests that strong LLMs can produce a range of reasonable ideas, but that range remains narrower than, and systematically shifted relative to, human research taste.

Ethical debates in AI have primarily focused on back-end issues such as data governance, model training, and algorithmic decision-making. Less attention has been paid to the ethical significance of front-end design choices, such as the interaction and representation-based elements through which users interact with AI systems. This gap is particularly significant for Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, where humanizing design elements such as dialogue-based interaction, emotive language, personality modes, and anthropomorphic metaphors are increasingly prevalent. This work argues that humanization in AI front-end design is a value-driven choice that profoundly shapes users' mental models, trust calibration, and behavioral responses. Drawing on research in human-computer interaction (HCI), conversational AI, and value-sensitive design, we examine how interfaces can play a central role in misaligning user expectations, fostering misplaced trust, and subtly undermining user autonomy, especially in vulnerable contexts. To ground this analysis, we discuss two AI systems developed by Chayn, a nonprofit organization supporting survivors of gender-based violence. Chayn is extremely cautious when building AI that interacts with or impacts survivors by operationalizing their trauma-informed design principles. This Chayn case study illustrates how ethical considerations can motivate principled restraint in interface design, challenging engagement-based norms in contemporary AI products. We argue that ethical front-end AI design is a form of procedural ethics, enacted through interaction choices rather than embedded solely in system logic.

In an ideal design pipeline, user interface (UI) design is intertwined with user research to validate decisions, yet studies are often resource-constrained during early exploration. Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a promising opportunity to act as early evaluators, helping designers narrow options before formal testing. Unlike prior work that emphasizes user behavior in narrow domains such as e-commerce with metrics like clicks or conversions, we focus on subjective user evaluations across varied interfaces. We investigate whether MLLMs can mimic human preferences when evaluating individual UIs and comparing them. Using data from a crowdsourcing platform, we benchmark GPT-4o, Claude, and Llama across 30 interfaces and examine alignment with human judgments on multiple UI factors. Our results show that MLLMs approximate human preferences on some dimensions but diverge on others, underscoring both their potential and limitations in supplementing early UX research.

Mixed-initiative visual analytics (VA) systems, where human and artificial intelligence (AI) agents collaborate as equal partners during analysis, represented a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction. With recent advances in AI, these systems have seen an increase in sophisticated software agents that have improved task planning, reasoning, and completion capabilities. However, while existing work characterizes agent interplay and communication strategies, there is a limited understanding of the overarching design principles for intelligent agents. Through a systematic review of 90 systems (and 207 unique agents), we propose a design space of intelligent agents comprising six dimensions that collectively characterize an agent's perception, environmental understanding, action capability, and communication strategies. We contribute a novel framework for researchers and designers to explore various design choices for new systems and to situate a system in the current landscape. We conclude with future research opportunities for intelligent agents in mixed-initiative VA systems.

Recent progress in personalized image generation using diffusion models has been significant. However, development in the area of open-domain and non-fine-tuning personalized image generation is proceeding rather slowly. In this paper, we propose Subject-Diffusion, a novel open-domain personalized image generation model that, in addition to not requiring test-time fine-tuning, also only requires a single reference image to support personalized generation of single- or multi-subject in any domain. Firstly, we construct an automatic data labeling tool and use the LAION-Aesthetics dataset to construct a large-scale dataset consisting of 76M images and their corresponding subject detection bounding boxes, segmentation masks and text descriptions. Secondly, we design a new unified framework that combines text and image semantics by incorporating coarse location and fine-grained reference image control to maximize subject fidelity and generalization. Furthermore, we also adopt an attention control mechanism to support multi-subject generation. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our method outperforms other SOTA frameworks in single, multiple, and human customized image generation. Please refer to our https://oppo-mente-lab.github.io/subject_diffusion/{project page}

We introduce DEsignBench, a text-to-image (T2I) generation benchmark tailored for visual design scenarios. Recent T2I models like DALL-E 3 and others, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating photorealistic images that align closely with textual inputs. While the allure of creating visually captivating images is undeniable, our emphasis extends beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. We aim to investigate the potential of using these powerful models in authentic design contexts. In pursuit of this goal, we develop DEsignBench, which incorporates test samples designed to assess T2I models on both "design technical capability" and "design application scenario." Each of these two dimensions is supported by a diverse set of specific design categories. We explore DALL-E 3 together with other leading T2I models on DEsignBench, resulting in a comprehensive visual gallery for side-by-side comparisons. For DEsignBench benchmarking, we perform human evaluations on generated images in DEsignBench gallery, against the criteria of image-text alignment, visual aesthetic, and design creativity. Our evaluation also considers other specialized design capabilities, including text rendering, layout composition, color harmony, 3D design, and medium style. In addition to human evaluations, we introduce the first automatic image generation evaluator powered by GPT-4V. This evaluator provides ratings that align well with human judgments, while being easily replicable and cost-efficient. A high-resolution version is available at https://github.com/design-bench/design-bench.github.io/raw/main/designbench.pdf?download=

Methods for finetuning generative models for concept-driven personalization generally achieve strong results for subject-driven or style-driven generation. Recently, low-rank adaptations (LoRA) have been proposed as a parameter-efficient way of achieving concept-driven personalization. While recent work explores the combination of separate LoRAs to achieve joint generation of learned styles and subjects, existing techniques do not reliably address the problem; they often compromise either subject fidelity or style fidelity. We propose ZipLoRA, a method to cheaply and effectively merge independently trained style and subject LoRAs in order to achieve generation of any user-provided subject in any user-provided style. Experiments on a wide range of subject and style combinations show that ZipLoRA can generate compelling results with meaningful improvements over baselines in subject and style fidelity while preserving the ability to recontextualize. Project page: https://ziplora.github.io

Curriculum design is a fundamental component of education. For example, when we learn mathematics at school, we build upon our knowledge of addition to learn multiplication. These and other concepts must be mastered before our first algebra lesson, which also reinforces our addition and multiplication skills. Designing a curriculum for teaching either a human or a machine shares the underlying goal of maximizing knowledge transfer from earlier to later tasks, while also minimizing forgetting of learned tasks. Prior research on curriculum design for image classification focuses on the ordering of training examples during a single offline task. Here, we investigate the effect of the order in which multiple distinct tasks are learned in a sequence. We focus on the online class-incremental continual learning setting, where algorithms or humans must learn image classes one at a time during a single pass through a dataset. We find that curriculum consistently influences learning outcomes for humans and for multiple continual machine learning algorithms across several benchmark datasets. We introduce a novel-object recognition dataset for human curriculum learning experiments and observe that curricula that are effective for humans are highly correlated with those that are effective for machines. As an initial step towards automated curriculum design for online class-incremental learning, we propose a novel algorithm, dubbed Curriculum Designer (CD), that designs and ranks curricula based on inter-class feature similarities. We find significant overlap between curricula that are empirically highly effective and those that are highly ranked by our CD. Our study establishes a framework for further research on teaching humans and machines to learn continuously using optimized curricula.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown remarkable success in generating a personalized subject based on a few reference images. However, current methods struggle with handling multiple subjects simultaneously, often resulting in mixed identities with combined attributes from different subjects. In this work, we present MuDI, a novel framework that enables multi-subject personalization by effectively decoupling identities from multiple subjects. Our main idea is to utilize segmented subjects generated by the Segment Anything Model for both training and inference, as a form of data augmentation for training and initialization for the generation process. Our experiments demonstrate that MuDI can produce high-quality personalized images without identity mixing, even for highly similar subjects as shown in Figure 1. In human evaluation, MuDI shows twice as many successes for personalizing multiple subjects without identity mixing over existing baselines and is preferred over 70% compared to the strongest baseline. More results are available at https://mudi-t2i.github.io/.

Existing subject-driven text-to-image generation models suffer from tedious fine-tuning steps and struggle to maintain both text-image alignment and subject fidelity. For generating compositional subjects, it often encounters problems such as object missing and attribute mixing, where some subjects in the input prompt are not generated or their attributes are incorrectly combined. To address these limitations, we propose a subject-driven generation framework and introduce training-free guidance to intervene in the generative process during inference time. This approach strengthens the attention map, allowing for precise attribute binding and feature injection for each subject. Notably, our method exhibits exceptional zero-shot generation ability, especially in the challenging task of compositional generation. Furthermore, we propose a novel metric GroundingScore to evaluate subject alignment thoroughly. The obtained quantitative results serve as compelling evidence showcasing the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code will be released soon.

Text-to-image diffusion models have an unprecedented ability to generate diverse and high-quality images. However, they often struggle to faithfully capture the intended semantics of complex input prompts that include multiple subjects. Recently, numerous layout-to-image extensions have been introduced to improve user control, aiming to localize subjects represented by specific tokens. Yet, these methods often produce semantically inaccurate images, especially when dealing with multiple semantically or visually similar subjects. In this work, we study and analyze the causes of these limitations. Our exploration reveals that the primary issue stems from inadvertent semantic leakage between subjects in the denoising process. This leakage is attributed to the diffusion model's attention layers, which tend to blend the visual features of different subjects. To address these issues, we introduce Bounded Attention, a training-free method for bounding the information flow in the sampling process. Bounded Attention prevents detrimental leakage among subjects and enables guiding the generation to promote each subject's individuality, even with complex multi-subject conditioning. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method empowers the generation of multiple subjects that better align with given prompts and layouts.

Subject-driven text-to-image generation models create novel renditions of an input subject based on text prompts. Existing models suffer from lengthy fine-tuning and difficulties preserving the subject fidelity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce BLIP-Diffusion, a new subject-driven image generation model that supports multimodal control which consumes inputs of subject images and text prompts. Unlike other subject-driven generation models, BLIP-Diffusion introduces a new multimodal encoder which is pre-trained to provide subject representation. We first pre-train the multimodal encoder following BLIP-2 to produce visual representation aligned with the text. Then we design a subject representation learning task which enables a diffusion model to leverage such visual representation and generates new subject renditions. Compared with previous methods such as DreamBooth, our model enables zero-shot subject-driven generation, and efficient fine-tuning for customized subject with up to 20x speedup. We also demonstrate that BLIP-Diffusion can be flexibly combined with existing techniques such as ControlNet and prompt-to-prompt to enable novel subject-driven generation and editing applications. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/salesforce/LAVIS/tree/main/projects/blip-diffusion. Project page at https://dxli94.github.io/BLIP-Diffusion-website/.

In an era where images and visual content dominate our digital landscape, the ability to manipulate and personalize these images has become a necessity. Envision seamlessly substituting a tabby cat lounging on a sunlit window sill in a photograph with your own playful puppy, all while preserving the original charm and composition of the image. We present Photoswap, a novel approach that enables this immersive image editing experience through personalized subject swapping in existing images. Photoswap first learns the visual concept of the subject from reference images and then swaps it into the target image using pre-trained diffusion models in a training-free manner. We establish that a well-conceptualized visual subject can be seamlessly transferred to any image with appropriate self-attention and cross-attention manipulation, maintaining the pose of the swapped subject and the overall coherence of the image. Comprehensive experiments underscore the efficacy and controllability of Photoswap in personalized subject swapping. Furthermore, Photoswap significantly outperforms baseline methods in human ratings across subject swapping, background preservation, and overall quality, revealing its vast application potential, from entertainment to professional editing.

Subject-driven image generation plays a crucial role in applications such as virtual try-on and poster design. Existing approaches typically fine-tune pretrained generative models or apply LoRA-based adaptations for individual subjects. However, these methods struggle with multi-subject personalization, as combining independently adapted modules often requires complex re-tuning or joint optimization. We present FreeLoRA, a simple and generalizable framework that enables training-free fusion of subject-specific LoRA modules for multi-subject personalization. Each LoRA module is adapted on a few images of a specific subject using a Full Token Tuning strategy, where it is applied across all tokens in the prompt to encourage weakly supervised token-content alignment. At inference, we adopt Subject-Aware Inference, activating each module only on its corresponding subject tokens. This enables training-free fusion of multiple personalized subjects within a single image, while mitigating overfitting and mutual interference between subjects. Extensive experiments show that FreeLoRA achieves strong performance in both subject fidelity and prompt consistency.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks (e.g., image captioning, visual question answering). While broad, their knowledge remains generic (e.g., recognizing a dog), and they are unable to handle personalized subjects (e.g., recognizing a user's pet dog). Human reasoning, in contrast, typically operates within the context of specific subjects in our surroundings. For example, one might ask, "What should I buy for my dog's birthday?"; as opposed to a generic inquiry about "What should I buy for a dog's birthday?". Similarly, when looking at a friend's image, the interest lies in seeing their activities (e.g., "my friend is holding a cat"), rather than merely observing generic human actions (e.g., "a man is holding a cat"). In this paper, we introduce the novel task of personalizing LMMs, so that they can have conversations about a specific subject. We propose Yo'LLaVA, which learns to embed a personalized subject into a set of latent tokens given a handful of example images of the subject. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that Yo'LLaVA can learn the concept more efficiently using fewer tokens and more effectively encode the visual attributes compared to strong prompting baselines (e.g., LLaVA).

Subject-driven generation has garnered significant interest recently due to its ability to personalize text-to-image generation. Typical works focus on learning the new subject's private attributes. However, an important fact has not been taken seriously that a subject is not an isolated new concept but should be a specialization of a certain category in the pre-trained model. This results in the subject failing to comprehensively inherit the attributes in its category, causing poor attribute-related generations. In this paper, motivated by object-oriented programming, we model the subject as a derived class whose base class is its semantic category. This modeling enables the subject to inherit public attributes from its category while learning its private attributes from the user-provided example. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play method, Subject-Derived regularization (SuDe). It constructs the base-derived class modeling by constraining the subject-driven generated images to semantically belong to the subject's category. Extensive experiments under three baselines and two backbones on various subjects show that our SuDe enables imaginative attribute-related generations while maintaining subject fidelity. Codes will be open sourced soon at FaceChain (https://github.com/modelscope/facechain).

Subject-driven image generation aims at generating images containing customized subjects, which has recently drawn enormous attention from the research community. However, the previous works cannot precisely control the background and position of the target subject. In this work, we aspire to fill the void and propose two novel subject-driven sub-tasks, i.e., Subject Replacement and Subject Addition. The new tasks are challenging in multiple aspects: replacing a subject with a customized one can change its shape, texture, and color, while adding a target subject to a designated position in a provided scene necessitates a context-aware posture. To conquer these two novel tasks, we first manually curate a new dataset DreamEditBench containing 22 different types of subjects, and 440 source images with different difficulty levels. We plan to host DreamEditBench as a platform and hire trained evaluators for standard human evaluation. We also devise an innovative method DreamEditor to resolve these tasks by performing iterative generation, which enables a smooth adaptation to the customized subject. In this project, we conduct automatic and human evaluations to understand the performance of DreamEditor and baselines on DreamEditBench. For Subject Replacement, we found that the existing models are sensitive to the shape and color of the original subject. The model failure rate will dramatically increase when the source and target subjects are highly different. For Subject Addition, we found that the existing models cannot easily blend the customized subjects into the background smoothly, leading to noticeable artifacts in the generated image. We hope DreamEditBench can become a standard platform to enable future investigations toward building more controllable subject-driven image editing. Our project homepage is https://dreameditbenchteam.github.io/.

Subject-driven text-to-image (T2I) customization has drawn significant interest in academia and industry. This task enables pre-trained models to generate novel images based on unique subjects. Existing studies adopt a self-reconstructive perspective, focusing on capturing all details of a single image, which will misconstrue the specific image's irrelevant attributes (e.g., view, pose, and background) as the subject intrinsic attributes. This misconstruction leads to both overfitting or underfitting of irrelevant and intrinsic attributes of the subject, i.e., these attributes are over-represented or under-represented simultaneously, causing a trade-off between similarity and controllability. In this study, we argue an ideal subject representation can be achieved by a cross-differential perspective, i.e., decoupling subject intrinsic attributes from irrelevant attributes via contrastive learning, which allows the model to focus more on intrinsic attributes through intra-consistency (features of the same subject are spatially closer) and inter-distinctiveness (features of different subjects have distinguished differences). Specifically, we propose CustomContrast, a novel framework, which includes a Multilevel Contrastive Learning (MCL) paradigm and a Multimodal Feature Injection (MFI) Encoder. The MCL paradigm is used to extract intrinsic features of subjects from high-level semantics to low-level appearance through crossmodal semantic contrastive learning and multiscale appearance contrastive learning. To facilitate contrastive learning, we introduce the MFI encoder to capture cross-modal representations. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of CustomContrast in subject similarity and text controllability.

While text-to-image generative models can synthesize diverse and faithful contents, subject variation across multiple creations limits the application in long content generation. Existing approaches require time-consuming tuning, references for all subjects, or access to other creations. We introduce Contrastive Concept Instantiation (CoCoIns) to effectively synthesize consistent subjects across multiple independent creations. The framework consists of a generative model and a mapping network, which transforms input latent codes into pseudo-words associated with certain instances of concepts. Users can generate consistent subjects with the same latent codes. To construct such associations, we propose a contrastive learning approach that trains the network to differentiate the combination of prompts and latent codes. Extensive evaluations of human faces with a single subject show that CoCoIns performs comparably to existing methods while maintaining higher flexibility. We also demonstrate the potential of extending CoCoIns to multiple subjects and other object categories.

With the rapid development of diffusion models in image generation, the demand for more powerful and flexible controllable frameworks is increasing. Although existing methods can guide generation beyond text prompts, the challenge of effectively combining multiple conditional inputs while maintaining consistency with all of them remains unsolved. To address this, we introduce UniCombine, a DiT-based multi-conditional controllable generative framework capable of handling any combination of conditions, including but not limited to text prompts, spatial maps, and subject images. Specifically, we introduce a novel Conditional MMDiT Attention mechanism and incorporate a trainable LoRA module to build both the training-free and training-based versions. Additionally, we propose a new pipeline to construct SubjectSpatial200K, the first dataset designed for multi-conditional generative tasks covering both the subject-driven and spatially-aligned conditions. Extensive experimental results on multi-conditional generation demonstrate the outstanding universality and powerful capability of our approach with state-of-the-art performance.

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal search engine for interior design that combines visual and textual queries. The goal of our engine is to retrieve interior objects, e.g. furniture or wall clocks, that share visual and aesthetic similarities with the query. Our search engine allows the user to take a photo of a room and retrieve with a high recall a list of items identical or visually similar to those present in the photo. Additionally, it allows to return other items that aesthetically and stylistically fit well together. To achieve this goal, our system blends the results obtained using textual and visual modalities. Thanks to this blending strategy, we increase the average style similarity score of the retrieved items by 11%. Our work is implemented as a Web-based application and it is planned to be opened to the public.

Interior design allows us to be who we are and live how we want - each design is as unique as our distinct personality. However, it is not trivial for non-professionals to express and materialize this since it requires aligning functional and visual expectations with the constraints of physical space; this renders interior design a luxury. To make it more accessible, we present I-Design, a personalized interior designer that allows users to generate and visualize their design goals through natural language communication. I-Design starts with a team of large language model agents that engage in dialogues and logical reasoning with one another, transforming textual user input into feasible scene graph designs with relative object relationships. Subsequently, an effective placement algorithm determines optimal locations for each object within the scene. The final design is then constructed in 3D by retrieving and integrating assets from an existing object database. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation protocol that utilizes a vision-language model and complements the design pipeline. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that I-Design outperforms existing methods in delivering high-quality 3D design solutions and aligning with abstract concepts that match user input, showcasing its advantages across detailed 3D arrangement and conceptual fidelity.

Customized text-to-video generation aims to generate high-quality videos guided by text prompts and subject references. Current approaches designed for single subjects suffer from tackling multiple subjects, which is a more challenging and practical scenario. In this work, we aim to promote multi-subject guided text-to-video customization. We propose CustomVideo, a novel framework that can generate identity-preserving videos with the guidance of multiple subjects. To be specific, firstly, we encourage the co-occurrence of multiple subjects via composing them in a single image. Further, upon a basic text-to-video diffusion model, we design a simple yet effective attention control strategy to disentangle different subjects in the latent space of diffusion model. Moreover, to help the model focus on the specific object area, we segment the object from given reference images and provide a corresponding object mask for attention learning. Also, we collect a multi-subject text-to-video generation dataset as a comprehensive benchmark, with 69 individual subjects and 57 meaningful pairs. Extensive qualitative, quantitative, and user study results demonstrate the superiority of our method, compared with the previous state-of-the-art approaches.

The development and popularization of large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns that they will be used to create tailor-made, convincing arguments to push false or misleading narratives online. Early work has found that language models can generate content perceived as at least on par and often more persuasive than human-written messages. However, there is still limited knowledge about LLMs' persuasive capabilities in direct conversations with human counterparts and how personalization can improve their performance. In this pre-registered study, we analyze the effect of AI-driven persuasion in a controlled, harmless setting. We create a web-based platform where participants engage in short, multiple-round debates with a live opponent. Each participant is randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions, corresponding to a two-by-two factorial design: (1) Games are either played between two humans or between a human and an LLM; (2) Personalization might or might not be enabled, granting one of the two players access to basic sociodemographic information about their opponent. We found that participants who debated GPT-4 with access to their personal information had 81.7% (p < 0.01; N=820 unique participants) higher odds of increased agreement with their opponents compared to participants who debated humans. Without personalization, GPT-4 still outperforms humans, but the effect is lower and statistically non-significant (p=0.31). Overall, our results suggest that concerns around personalization are meaningful and have important implications for the governance of social media and the design of new online environments.

The proliferation of applications using artificial intelligence (AI) systems has led to a growing number of users interacting with these systems through sophisticated interfaces. Human-computer interaction research has long shown that interfaces shape both user behavior and user perception of technical capabilities and risks. Yet, practitioners and researchers evaluating the social and ethical risks of AI systems tend to overlook the impact of anthropomorphic, deceptive, and immersive interfaces on human-AI interactions. Here, we argue that design features of interfaces with adaptive AI systems can have cascading impacts, driven by feedback loops, which extend beyond those previously considered. We first conduct a scoping review of AI interface designs and their negative impact to extract salient themes of potentially harmful design patterns in AI interfaces. Then, we propose Design-Enhanced Control of AI systems (DECAI), a conceptual model to structure and facilitate impact assessments of AI interface designs. DECAI draws on principles from control systems theory -- a theory for the analysis and design of dynamic physical systems -- to dissect the role of the interface in human-AI systems. Through two case studies on recommendation systems and conversational language model systems, we show how DECAI can be used to evaluate AI interface designs.

Layout design is an important task in various design fields, including user interface, document, and graphic design. As this task requires tedious manual effort by designers, prior works have attempted to automate this process using generative models, but commonly fell short of providing intuitive user controls and achieving design objectives. In this paper, we build a conditional latent diffusion model, PLay, that generates parametrically conditioned layouts in vector graphic space from user-specified guidelines, which are commonly used by designers for representing their design intents in current practices. Our method outperforms prior works across three datasets on metrics including FID and FD-VG, and in user study. Moreover, it brings a novel and interactive experience to professional layout design processes.

With the advance of diffusion models, various personalized image generation methods have been proposed. However, almost all existing work only focuses on either subject-driven or style-driven personalization. Meanwhile, state-of-the-art methods face several challenges in realizing compositional personalization, i.e., composing different subject and style concepts, such as concept disentanglement, unified reconstruction paradigm, and insufficient training data. To address these issues, we introduce FreeTuner, a flexible and training-free method for compositional personalization that can generate any user-provided subject in any user-provided style (see Figure 1). Our approach employs a disentanglement strategy that separates the generation process into two stages to effectively mitigate concept entanglement. FreeTuner leverages the intermediate features within the diffusion model for subject concept representation and introduces style guidance to align the synthesized images with the style concept, ensuring the preservation of both the subject's structure and the style's aesthetic features. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the generation ability of FreeTuner across various personalization settings.

Achieving fine-grained control over subject identity and semantic attributes (pose, style, lighting) in text-to-image generation, particularly for multiple subjects, often undermines the editability and coherence of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). Many approaches introduce artifacts or suffer from attribute entanglement. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel multi-subject controlled generation model XVerse. By transforming reference images into offsets for token-specific text-stream modulation, XVerse allows for precise and independent control for specific subject without disrupting image latents or features. Consequently, XVerse offers high-fidelity, editable multi-subject image synthesis with robust control over individual subject characteristics and semantic attributes. This advancement significantly improves personalized and complex scene generation capabilities.

Modern engineering, spanning electrical, mechanical, aerospace, civil, and computer disciplines, stands as a cornerstone of human civilization and the foundation of our society. However, engineering design poses a fundamentally different challenge for large language models (LLMs) compared with traditional textbook-style problem solving or factual question answering. Although existing benchmarks have driven progress in areas such as language understanding, code synthesis, and scientific problem solving, real-world engineering design demands the synthesis of domain knowledge, navigation of complex trade-offs, and management of the tedious processes that consume much of practicing engineers' time. Despite these shared challenges across engineering disciplines, no benchmark currently captures the unique demands of engineering design work. In this work, we introduce EngDesign, an Engineering Design benchmark that evaluates LLMs' abilities to perform practical design tasks across nine engineering domains. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on factual recall or question answering, EngDesign uniquely emphasizes LLMs' ability to synthesize domain knowledge, reason under constraints, and generate functional, objective-oriented engineering designs. Each task in EngDesign represents a real-world engineering design problem, accompanied by a detailed task description specifying design goals, constraints, and performance requirements. EngDesign pioneers a simulation-based evaluation paradigm that moves beyond textbook knowledge to assess genuine engineering design capabilities and shifts evaluation from static answer checking to dynamic, simulation-driven functional verification, marking a crucial step toward realizing the vision of engineering Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

We present Subject Fidelity Optimization (SFO), a novel comparative learning framework for zero-shot subject-driven generation that enhances subject fidelity. Beyond supervised fine-tuning methods that rely only on positive targets and use the diffusion loss as in the pre-training stage, SFO introduces synthetic negative targets and explicitly guides the model to favor positives over negatives through pairwise comparison. For negative targets, we propose Condition-Degradation Negative Sampling (CDNS), which automatically generates distinctive and informative negatives by intentionally degrading visual and textual cues without expensive human annotations. Moreover, we reweight the diffusion timesteps to focus finetuning on intermediate steps where subject details emerge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFO with CDNS significantly outperforms baselines in terms of both subject fidelity and text alignment on a subject-driven generation benchmark. Project page: https://subjectfidelityoptimization.github.io/

In this work, we investigate automatic design composition from multimodal graphic elements. Although recent studies have developed various generative models for graphic design, they usually face the following limitations: they only focus on certain subtasks and are far from achieving the design composition task; they do not consider the hierarchical information of graphic designs during the generation process. To tackle these issues, we introduce the layered design principle into Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and propose a novel approach, called LaDeCo, to accomplish this challenging task. Specifically, LaDeCo first performs layer planning for a given element set, dividing the input elements into different semantic layers according to their contents. Based on the planning results, it subsequently predicts element attributes that control the design composition in a layer-wise manner, and includes the rendered image of previously generated layers into the context. With this insightful design, LaDeCo decomposes the difficult task into smaller manageable steps, making the generation process smoother and clearer. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LaDeCo in design composition. Furthermore, we show that LaDeCo enables some interesting applications in graphic design, such as resolution adjustment, element filling, design variation, etc. In addition, it even outperforms the specialized models in some design subtasks without any task-specific training.

Visual communication, dating back to prehistoric cave paintings, is the use of visual elements to convey ideas and information. In today's visually saturated world, effective design demands an understanding of graphic design principles, visual storytelling, human psychology, and the ability to distill complex information into clear visuals. This dissertation explores how recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged to automate the creation of effective visual communication designs. Although generative models have made great progress in generating images from text, they still struggle to simplify complex ideas into clear, abstract visuals and are constrained by pixel-based outputs, which lack flexibility for many design tasks. To address these challenges, we constrain the models' operational space and introduce task-specific regularizations. We explore various aspects of visual communication, namely, sketches and visual abstraction, typography, animation, and visual inspiration.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people sought information through digital news platforms. To investigate how to design these platforms to support users' needs in a crisis, we conducted a two-week diary study with 22 participants across the United States. Participants' news-consumption experience followed two stages: in the seeking stage, participants increased their general consumption, motivated by three common informational needs -- specifically, to find, understand and verify relevant news pieces. Participants then moved to the sustaining stage, and coping with the news emotionally became as important as their informational needs. We elicited design ideas from participants and used these to distill six themes for creating digital news platforms that provide better informational and emotional support during a crisis. Thus, we contribute, first, a model of users' needs over time with respect to engaging with crisis news, and second, example design concepts for supporting users' needs in each of these stages.

In light of recent breakthroughs in text-to-image (T2I) generation, particularly with diffusion transformers (DiT), subject-driven technologies are increasingly being employed for high-fidelity customized production that preserves subject identity from reference inputs, enabling thrilling design workflows and engaging entertainment. Existing alternatives typically require either per-subject optimization via trainable text embeddings or training specialized encoders for subject feature extraction on large-scale datasets. Such dependencies on training procedures fundamentally constrain their practical applications. More importantly, current methodologies fail to fully leverage the inherent zero-shot potential of modern diffusion transformers (e.g., the Flux series) for authentic subject-driven synthesis. To bridge this gap, we propose FreeCus, a genuinely training-free framework that activates DiT's capabilities through three key innovations: 1) We introduce a pivotal attention sharing mechanism that captures the subject's layout integrity while preserving crucial editing flexibility. 2) Through a straightforward analysis of DiT's dynamic shifting, we propose an upgraded variant that significantly improves fine-grained feature extraction. 3) We further integrate advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enrich cross-modal semantic representations. Extensive experiments reflect that our method successfully unlocks DiT's zero-shot ability for consistent subject synthesis across diverse contexts, achieving state-of-the-art or comparable results compared to approaches that require additional training. Notably, our framework demonstrates seamless compatibility with existing inpainting pipelines and control modules, facilitating more compelling experiences. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Monalissaa/FreeCus.

Graphic design often involves exploring different stylistic directions, which can be time-consuming for non-experts. We address this problem of stylistically improving designs based on natural language instructions. While VLMs have shown initial success in graphic design, their pretrained knowledge on styles is often too general and misaligned with specific domain data. For example, VLMs may associate minimalism with abstract designs, whereas designers emphasize shape and color choices. Our key insight is to leverage design data -- a collection of real-world designs that implicitly capture designer's principles -- to learn design knowledge and guide stylistic improvement. We propose PRISM (PRior-Informed Stylistic Modification) that constructs and applies a design knowledge base through three stages: (1) clustering high-variance designs to capture diversity within a style, (2) summarizing each cluster into actionable design knowledge, and (3) retrieving relevant knowledge during inference to enable style-aware improvement. Experiments on the Crello dataset show that PRISM achieves the highest average rank of 1.49 (closer to 1 is better) over baselines in style alignment. User studies further validate these results, showing that PRISM is consistently preferred by designers.

Subject-driven text-to-image generation aims to produce images of a new subject within a desired context by accurately capturing both the visual characteristics of the subject and the semantic content of a text prompt. Traditional methods rely on time- and resource-intensive fine-tuning for subject alignment, while recent zero-shot approaches leverage on-the-fly image prompting, often sacrificing subject alignment. In this paper, we introduce Diptych Prompting, a novel zero-shot approach that reinterprets as an inpainting task with precise subject alignment by leveraging the emergent property of diptych generation in large-scale text-to-image models. Diptych Prompting arranges an incomplete diptych with the reference image in the left panel, and performs text-conditioned inpainting on the right panel. We further prevent unwanted content leakage by removing the background in the reference image and improve fine-grained details in the generated subject by enhancing attention weights between the panels during inpainting. Experimental results confirm that our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot image prompting methods, resulting in images that are visually preferred by users. Additionally, our method supports not only subject-driven generation but also stylized image generation and subject-driven image editing, demonstrating versatility across diverse image generation applications. Project page: https://diptychprompting.github.io/

Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are increasingly used for emotional and mental health support due to their low cost, immediacy, and accessibility. However, when safety guardrails are triggered, conversations may be abruptly terminated, introducing a distinct form of emotional disruption that can exacerbate distress and elevate risk among already vulnerable users. As this phenomenon gains attention, this viewpoint introduces Abrupt Refusal Secondary Harm (ARSH) as a conceptual framework to describe the psychological impacts of sudden conversational discontinuation caused by AI safety protocols. Drawing on counseling psychology and communication science as conceptual heuristics, we argue that abrupt refusals can rupture perceived relational continuity, evoke feelings of rejection or shame, and discourage future help seeking. To mitigate these risks, we propose a design hypothesis, the Compassionate Completion Standard (CCS), a refusal protocol grounded in Human Centered Design (HCD) that maintains safety constraints while preserving relational coherence. CCS emphasizes empathetic acknowledgment, transparent boundary articulation, graded conversational transition, and guided redirection, replacing abrupt disengagement with psychologically attuned closure. By integrating awareness of ARSH into AI safety design, developers and policymakers can reduce preventable iatrogenic harm and advance a more psychologically informed approach to AI governance. Rather than presenting incremental empirical findings, this viewpoint contributes a timely conceptual framework, articulates a testable design hypothesis, and outlines a coordinated research agenda for improving psychological safety in human AI interaction.

Subject-driven image generation has advanced from single- to multi-subject composition, while neglecting distinction, the ability to identify and generate the correct subject when inputs contain multiple candidates. This limitation restricts effectiveness in complex, realistic visual settings. We propose Scone, a unified understanding-generation method that integrates composition and distinction. Scone enables the understanding expert to act as a semantic bridge, conveying semantic information and guiding the generation expert to preserve subject identity while minimizing interference. A two-stage training scheme first learns composition, then enhances distinction through semantic alignment and attention-based masking. We also introduce SconeEval, a benchmark for evaluating both composition and distinction across diverse scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that Scone outperforms existing open-source models in composition and distinction tasks on two benchmarks. Our model, benchmark, and training data are available at: https://github.com/Ryann-Ran/Scone.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a new way to build chatbots by accepting natural language prompts. Yet, it is unclear how to design prompts to power chatbots to carry on naturalistic conversations while pursuing a given goal, such as collecting self-report data from users. We explore what design factors of prompts can help steer chatbots to talk naturally and collect data reliably. To this aim, we formulated four prompt designs with different structures and personas. Through an online study (N = 48) where participants conversed with chatbots driven by different designs of prompts, we assessed how prompt designs and conversation topics affected the conversation flows and users' perceptions of chatbots. Our chatbots covered 79% of the desired information slots during conversations, and the designs of prompts and topics significantly influenced the conversation flows and the data collection performance. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of building chatbots with LLMs.

Customized text-to-video generation aims to produce high-quality videos that incorporate user-specified subject identities or motion patterns. However, existing methods mainly focus on personalizing a single concept, either subject identity or motion pattern, limiting their effectiveness for multiple subjects with the desired motion patterns. To tackle this challenge, we propose a unified framework VideoMage for video customization over both multiple subjects and their interactive motions. VideoMage employs subject and motion LoRAs to capture personalized content from user-provided images and videos, along with an appearance-agnostic motion learning approach to disentangle motion patterns from visual appearance. Furthermore, we develop a spatial-temporal composition scheme to guide interactions among subjects within the desired motion patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoMage outperforms existing methods, generating coherent, user-controlled videos with consistent subject identities and interactions.

Recommender systems are quintessential applications of human-computer interaction. Widely utilized in daily life, they offer significant convenience but also present numerous challenges, such as the information cocoon effect, privacy concerns, fairness issues, and more. Consequently, this workshop aims to provide a platform for researchers to explore the development of Human-Centered Recommender Systems~(HCRS). HCRS refers to the creation of recommender systems that prioritize human needs, values, and capabilities at the core of their design and operation. In this workshop, topics will include, but are not limited to, robustness, privacy, transparency, fairness, diversity, accountability, ethical considerations, and user-friendly design. We hope to engage in discussions on how to implement and enhance these properties in recommender systems. Additionally, participants will explore diverse evaluation methods, including innovative metrics that capture user satisfaction and trust. This workshop seeks to foster a collaborative environment for researchers to share insights and advance the field toward more ethical, user-centric, and socially responsible recommender systems.

When assisting human users in reinforcement learning (RL), we can represent users as RL agents and study key parameters, called user traits, to inform intervention design. We study the relationship between user behaviors (policy classes) and user traits. Given an environment, we introduce an intuitive tool for studying the breakdown of "user types": broad sets of traits that result in the same behavior. We show that seemingly different real-world environments admit the same set of user types and formalize this observation as an equivalence relation defined on environments. By transferring intervention design between environments within the same equivalence class, we can help rapidly personalize interventions.

The continuous development of foundational models for video generation is evolving into various applications, with subject-consistent video generation still in the exploratory stage. We refer to this as Subject-to-Video, which extracts subject elements from reference images and generates subject-consistent video through textual instructions. We believe that the essence of subject-to-video lies in balancing the dual-modal prompts of text and image, thereby deeply and simultaneously aligning both text and visual content. To this end, we propose Phantom, a unified video generation framework for both single and multi-subject references. Building on existing text-to-video and image-to-video architectures, we redesign the joint text-image injection model and drive it to learn cross-modal alignment via text-image-video triplet data. In particular, we emphasize subject consistency in human generation, covering existing ID-preserving video generation while offering enhanced advantages. The project homepage is here https://phantom-video.github.io/Phantom/.

We introduce LICA (Layered Image Composition Annotations), a large-scale dataset of 1,550,244 multi-layer graphic design compositions designed to advance structured understanding and generation of graphic layouts1. In addition to ren- dered PNG images, LICA represents each design as a hierarchical composition of typed components including text, image, vector, and group elements, each paired with rich per-element metadata such as spatial geometry, typographic attributes, opacity, and visibility. The dataset spans 20 design categories and 971,850 unique templates, providing broad coverage of real-world design structures. We further introduce graphic design video as a new and largely unexplored challenge for current vision-language models through 27,261 animated layouts annotated with per-component keyframes and motion parameters. Beyond scale, LICA establishes a new paradigm of research tasks for graphic design, enabling structured investiga- tions into problems such as layer-aware inpainting, structured layout generation, controlled design editing, and temporally-aware generative modeling. By repre- senting design as a system of compositional layers and relationships, the dataset supports research on models that operate directly on design structure rather than pixels alone.

Personalizing text-to-image models to generate images of specific subjects across diverse scenes and styles is a rapidly advancing field. Current approaches often face challenges in maintaining a balance between identity preservation and alignment with the input text prompt. Some methods rely on a single textual token to represent a subject, which limits expressiveness, while others employ richer representations but disrupt the model's prior, diminishing prompt alignment. In this work, we introduce Nested Attention, a novel mechanism that injects a rich and expressive image representation into the model's existing cross-attention layers. Our key idea is to generate query-dependent subject values, derived from nested attention layers that learn to select relevant subject features for each region in the generated image. We integrate these nested layers into an encoder-based personalization method, and show that they enable high identity preservation while adhering to input text prompts. Our approach is general and can be trained on various domains. Additionally, its prior preservation allows us to combine multiple personalized subjects from different domains in a single image.

Blending visual and textual concepts into a new visual concept is a unique and powerful trait of human beings that can fuel creativity. However, in practice, cross-modal conceptual blending for humans is prone to cognitive biases, like design fixation, which leads to local minima in the design space. In this paper, we propose a T2I diffusion adapter "IT-Blender" that can automate the blending process to enhance human creativity. Prior works related to cross-modal conceptual blending are limited in encoding a real image without loss of details or in disentangling the image and text inputs. To address these gaps, IT-Blender leverages pretrained diffusion models (SD and FLUX) to blend the latent representations of a clean reference image with those of the noisy generated image. Combined with our novel blended attention, IT-Blender encodes the real reference image without loss of details and blends the visual concept with the object specified by the text in a disentangled way. Our experiment results show that IT-Blender outperforms the baselines by a large margin in blending visual and textual concepts, shedding light on the new application of image generative models to augment human creativity.

Explainability and interpretability of AI models is an essential factor affecting the safety of AI. While various explainable AI (XAI) approaches aim at mitigating the lack of transparency in deep networks, the evidence of the effectiveness of these approaches in improving usability, trust, and understanding of AI systems are still missing. We evaluate multimodal explanations in the setting of a Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, by asking users to predict the response accuracy of a VQA agent with and without explanations. We use between-subjects and within-subjects experiments to probe explanation effectiveness in terms of improving user prediction accuracy, confidence, and reliance, among other factors. The results indicate that the explanations help improve human prediction accuracy, especially in trials when the VQA system's answer is inaccurate. Furthermore, we introduce active attention, a novel method for evaluating causal attentional effects through intervention by editing attention maps. User explanation ratings are strongly correlated with human prediction accuracy and suggest the efficacy of these explanations in human-machine AI collaboration tasks.

Due to the demand for personalizing image generation, subject-driven text-to-image generation method, which creates novel renditions of an input subject based on text prompts, has received growing research interest. Existing methods often learn subject representation and incorporate it into the prompt embedding to guide image generation, but they struggle with preserving subject fidelity. To solve this issue, this paper approaches a novel framework named SceneBooth for subject-preserved text-to-image generation, which consumes inputs of a subject image, object phrases and text prompts. Instead of learning the subject representation and generating a subject, our SceneBooth fixes the given subject image and generates its background image guided by the text prompts. To this end, our SceneBooth introduces two key components, i.e., a multimodal layout generation module and a background painting module. The former determines the position and scale of the subject by generating appropriate scene layouts that align with text captions, object phrases, and subject visual information. The latter integrates two adapters (ControlNet and Gated Self-Attention) into the latent diffusion model to generate a background that harmonizes with the subject guided by scene layouts and text descriptions. In this manner, our SceneBooth ensures accurate preservation of the subject's appearance in the output. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate that SceneBooth significantly outperforms baseline methods in terms of subject preservation, image harmonization and overall quality.

Multi-subject personalized image generation aims to synthesize customized images containing multiple specified subjects without requiring test-time optimization. However, achieving fine-grained independent control over multiple subjects remains challenging due to difficulties in preserving subject fidelity and preventing cross-subject attribute leakage. We present FocusDPO, a framework that adaptively identifies focus regions based on dynamic semantic correspondence and supervision image complexity. During training, our method progressively adjusts these focal areas across noise timesteps, implementing a weighted strategy that rewards information-rich patches while penalizing regions with low prediction confidence. The framework dynamically adjusts focus allocation during the DPO process according to the semantic complexity of reference images and establishes robust correspondence mappings between generated and reference subjects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially enhances the performance of existing pre-trained personalized generation models, achieving state-of-the-art results on both single-subject and multi-subject personalized image synthesis benchmarks. Our method effectively mitigates attribute leakage while preserving superior subject fidelity across diverse generation scenarios, advancing the frontier of controllable multi-subject image synthesis.

Our interest is in the design of software systems involving a human-expert interacting -- using natural language -- with a large language model (LLM) on data analysis tasks. For complex problems, it is possible that LLMs can harness human expertise and creativity to find solutions that were otherwise elusive. On one level, this interaction takes place through multiple turns of prompts from the human and responses from the LLM. Here we investigate a more structured approach based on an abstract protocol described in [3] for interaction between agents. The protocol is motivated by a notion of "two-way intelligibility" and is modelled by a pair of communicating finite-state machines. We provide an implementation of the protocol, and provide empirical evidence of using the implementation to mediate interactions between an LLM and a human-agent in two areas of scientific interest (radiology and drug design). We conduct controlled experiments with a human proxy (a database), and uncontrolled experiments with human subjects. The results provide evidence in support of the protocol's capability of capturing one- and two-way intelligibility in human-LLM interaction; and for the utility of two-way intelligibility in the design of human-machine systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/karannb/interact.

As AI systems enter into a growing number of societal domains, these systems increasingly shape and are shaped by user preferences, opinions, and behaviors. However, the design of AI systems rarely accounts for how AI and users shape one another. In this position paper, we argue for the development of formal interaction models which mathematically specify how AI and users shape one another. Formal interaction models can be leveraged to (1) specify interactions for implementation, (2) monitor interactions through empirical analysis, (3) anticipate societal impacts via counterfactual analysis, and (4) control societal impacts via interventions. The design space of formal interaction models is vast, and model design requires careful consideration of factors such as style, granularity, mathematical complexity, and measurability. Using content recommender systems as a case study, we critically examine the nascent literature of formal interaction models with respect to these use-cases and design axes. More broadly, we call for the community to leverage formal interaction models when designing, evaluating, or auditing any AI system which interacts with users.

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit anthropomorphism characteristics -- human-like qualities portrayed across their outlook, language, behavior, and reasoning functions. Such characteristics enable more intuitive and engaging human-AI interactions. However, current research on anthropomorphism remains predominantly risk-focused, emphasizing over-trust and user deception while offering limited design guidance. We argue that anthropomorphism should instead be treated as a concept of design that can be intentionally tuned to support user goals. Drawing from multiple disciplines, we propose that the anthropomorphism of an LLM-based artifact should reflect the interaction between artifact designers and interpreters. This interaction is facilitated by cues embedded in the artifact by the designers and the (cognitive) responses of the interpreters to the cues. Cues are categorized into four dimensions: perceptive, linguistic, behavioral, and cognitive. By analyzing the manifestation and effectiveness of each cue, we provide a unified taxonomy with actionable levers for practitioners. Consequently, we advocate for function-oriented evaluations of anthropomorphic design.

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models spurred research on personalization, i.e., a customized image synthesis, of subjects within reference images. Although existing personalization methods are able to alter the subjects' positions or to personalize multiple subjects simultaneously, they often struggle to modify the behaviors of subjects or their dynamic interactions. The difficulty is attributable to overfitting to reference images, which worsens if only a single reference image is available. We propose DynASyn, an effective multi-subject personalization from a single reference image addressing these challenges. DynASyn preserves the subject identity in the personalization process by aligning concept-based priors with subject appearances and actions. This is achieved by regularizing the attention maps between the subject token and images through concept-based priors. In addition, we propose concept-based prompt-and-image augmentation for an enhanced trade-off between identity preservation and action diversity. We adopt an SDE-based editing guided by augmented prompts to generate diverse appearances and actions while maintaining identity consistency in the augmented images. Experiments show that DynASyn is capable of synthesizing highly realistic images of subjects with novel contexts and dynamic interactions with the surroundings, and outperforms baseline methods in both quantitative and qualitative aspects.

Recent years have witnessed the strong power of 3D generation models, which offer a new level of creative flexibility by allowing users to guide the 3D content generation process through a single image or natural language. However, it remains challenging for existing 3D generation methods to create subject-driven 3D content across diverse prompts. In this paper, we introduce a novel 3D customization method, dubbed Make-Your-3D that can personalize high-fidelity and consistent 3D content from only a single image of a subject with text description within 5 minutes. Our key insight is to harmonize the distributions of a multi-view diffusion model and an identity-specific 2D generative model, aligning them with the distribution of the desired 3D subject. Specifically, we design a co-evolution framework to reduce the variance of distributions, where each model undergoes a process of learning from the other through identity-aware optimization and subject-prior optimization, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can produce high-quality, consistent, and subject-specific 3D content with text-driven modifications that are unseen in subject image.

We present Large Language Model for Mixed Reality (LLMR), a framework for the real-time creation and modification of interactive Mixed Reality experiences using LLMs. LLMR leverages novel strategies to tackle difficult cases where ideal training data is scarce, or where the design goal requires the synthesis of internal dynamics, intuitive analysis, or advanced interactivity. Our framework relies on text interaction and the Unity game engine. By incorporating techniques for scene understanding, task planning, self-debugging, and memory management, LLMR outperforms the standard GPT-4 by 4x in average error rate. We demonstrate LLMR's cross-platform interoperability with several example worlds, and evaluate it on a variety of creation and modification tasks to show that it can produce and edit diverse objects, tools, and scenes. Finally, we conducted a usability study (N=11) with a diverse set that revealed participants had positive experiences with the system and would use it again.

Individuals frequently form deep attachments to physical objects (e.g., plush toys) that usually cannot sense or respond to their emotions. While AI companions offer responsiveness and personalization, they exist independently of these physical objects and lack an ongoing connection to them. To bridge this gap, we conducted a formative study (N=9) to explore how digital agents could inherit and extend the emotional bond, deriving four design principles (Faithful Identity, Calibrated Agency, Ambient Presence, and Reciprocal Memory). We then present the Dual-Embodiment Companion Framework, instantiated as Deco, a mobile system integrating multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) and Augmented Reality to create synchronized digital embodiments of users' physical companions. A within-subjects study (N=25) showed Deco significantly outperformed a personalized LLM-empowered digital companion baseline on perceived companionship, emotional bond, and design-principle scales (all p<0.01). A seven-day field deployment (N=17) showed sustained engagement, subjective well-being improvement (p=.040), and three key relational patterns: digital activities retroactively vitalized physical objects, bond deepening was driven by emotional engagement depth rather than interaction frequency, and users sustained bonds while actively navigating digital companions' AI nature. This work highlights a promising alternative for designing digital companions: moving from creating new relationships to dual embodiment, where digital agents seamlessly extend the emotional history of physical objects.

We propose a simple yet effective zero-shot framework for subject-driven image generation using a vanilla Flux model. By framing the task as grid-based image completion and simply replicating the subject image(s) in a mosaic layout, we activate strong identity-preserving capabilities without any additional data, training, or inference-time fine-tuning. This "free lunch" approach is further strengthened by a novel cascade attention design and meta prompting technique, boosting fidelity and versatility. Experimental results show that our method outperforms baselines across multiple key metrics in benchmarks and human preference studies, with trade-offs in certain aspects. Additionally, it supports diverse edits, including logo insertion, virtual try-on, and subject replacement or insertion. These results demonstrate that a pre-trained foundational text-to-image model can enable high-quality, resource-efficient subject-driven generation, opening new possibilities for lightweight customization in downstream applications.

Despite their impressive visual fidelity, existing personalized generative models lack interactive control over spatial composition and scale poorly to multiple subjects. To address these limitations, we present LayerComposer, an interactive framework for personalized, multi-subject text-to-image generation. Our approach introduces two main contributions: (1) a layered canvas, a novel representation in which each subject is placed on a distinct layer, enabling occlusion-free composition; and (2) a locking mechanism that preserves selected layers with high fidelity while allowing the remaining layers to adapt flexibly to the surrounding context. Similar to professional image-editing software, the proposed layered canvas allows users to place, resize, or lock input subjects through intuitive layer manipulation. Our versatile locking mechanism requires no architectural changes, relying instead on inherent positional embeddings combined with a new complementary data sampling strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LayerComposer achieves superior spatial control and identity preservation compared to the state-of-the-art methods in multi-subject personalized image generation.

Concept Design structures software systems around concepts: user-facing, self-contained units of functionality with a focused purpose. Concepts are composed into applications using synchronization rules called reactions, which specify how actions in one concept trigger actions in others. This paper first gives a formal semantics for concepts and reactions, enabling automatic verification of safety invariants in applications developed with this methodology. It then presents a CEGIS-style, LLM-driven synthesis procedure for generating reaction designs that satisfy such invariants. Because many different designs can satisfy the same invariant, we study two ways of steering synthesis toward the user's intended design: natural-language prompts and positive/negative scenarios. We also propose an LLM-driven scenario elicitation technique to support early design exploration. In an evaluation on three applications and twelve design variants using one LLM configuration, invariant-only synthesis reached verified designs quickly but often produced inconsistent designs across runs, some of which were implausible, showing that invariants alone underconstrain the design task. Scenario-guided synthesis recovered intended designs more consistently than natural-language prompting, although minimal scenarios can lead to overfitting. LLM-driven scenario elicitation, where the user classifies proposed scenarios rather than authoring them from scratch, recovered the intended designs in most variants when enough scenarios were elicited, but missed behaviors and non-determinism prevented reliable coverage in all cases.

Generative AI systems have been heralded as tools for augmenting human creativity and inspiring divergent thinking, though with little empirical evidence for these claims. This paper explores the effects of exposure to AI-generated images on measures of design fixation and divergent thinking in a visual ideation task. Through a between-participants experiment (N=60), we found that support from an AI image generator during ideation leads to higher fixation on an initial example. Participants who used AI produced fewer ideas, with less variety and lower originality compared to a baseline. Our qualitative analysis suggests that the effectiveness of co-ideation with AI rests on participants' chosen approach to prompt creation and on the strategies used by participants to generate ideas in response to the AI's suggestions. We discuss opportunities for designing generative AI systems for ideation support and incorporating these AI tools into ideation workflows.

Inverse design, where we seek to design input variables in order to optimize an underlying objective function, is an important problem that arises across fields such as mechanical engineering to aerospace engineering. Inverse design is typically formulated as an optimization problem, with recent works leveraging optimization across learned dynamics models. However, as models are optimized they tend to fall into adversarial modes, preventing effective sampling. We illustrate that by instead optimizing over the learned energy function captured by the diffusion model, we can avoid such adversarial examples and significantly improve design performance. We further illustrate how such a design system is compositional, enabling us to combine multiple different diffusion models representing subcomponents of our desired system to design systems with every specified component. In an N-body interaction task and a challenging 2D multi-airfoil design task, we demonstrate that by composing the learned diffusion model at test time, our method allows us to design initial states and boundary shapes that are more complex than those in the training data. Our method generalizes to more objects for N-body dataset and discovers formation flying to minimize drag in the multi-airfoil design task. Project website and code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/cindm.

Recent subject-driven image customization has achieved significant advancements in fidelity, yet fine-grained instance-level spatial control remains elusive, hindering broader real-world application. This limitation is mainly attributed to the absence of scalable datasets that bind identity with precise positional cues. To this end, we introduce PositionIC, a unified framework that enforces position and identity consistency for multi-subject customization. We construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that employs a bidirectional generation paradigm to eliminate subject drift and maintain semantic coherence. On top of these data, we design a lightweight positional modulation operation that decouples spatial embeddings among subjects, enabling independent, accurate placement while preserving visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve precise spatial control while maintaining high consistency in image customization tasks. PositionIC paves the way for controllable, high-fidelity image customization in open-world, multi-entity scenarios and will be released to foster further research.

Large text-to-image models achieved a remarkable leap in the evolution of AI, enabling high-quality and diverse synthesis of images from a given text prompt. However, these models lack the ability to mimic the appearance of subjects in a given reference set and synthesize novel renditions of them in different contexts. In this work, we present a new approach for "personalization" of text-to-image diffusion models (specializing them to users' needs). Given as input just a few images of a subject, we fine-tune a pretrained text-to-image model (Imagen, although our method is not limited to a specific model) such that it learns to bind a unique identifier with that specific subject. Once the subject is embedded in the output domain of the model, the unique identifier can then be used to synthesize fully-novel photorealistic images of the subject contextualized in different scenes. By leveraging the semantic prior embedded in the model with a new autogenous class-specific prior preservation loss, our technique enables synthesizing the subject in diverse scenes, poses, views, and lighting conditions that do not appear in the reference images. We apply our technique to several previously-unassailable tasks, including subject recontextualization, text-guided view synthesis, appearance modification, and artistic rendering (all while preserving the subject's key features). Project page: https://dreambooth.github.io/

Advanced generative models excel at synthesizing images but often rely on text-based conditioning. Visual designers, however, often work beyond language, directly drawing inspiration from existing visual elements. In many cases, these elements represent only fragments of a potential concept-such as an uniquely structured wing, or a specific hairstyle-serving as inspiration for the artist to explore how they can come together creatively into a coherent whole. Recognizing this need, we introduce a generative framework that seamlessly integrates a partial set of user-provided visual components into a coherent composition while simultaneously sampling the missing parts needed to generate a plausible and complete concept. Our approach builds on a strong and underexplored representation space, extracted from IP-Adapter+, on which we train IP-Prior, a lightweight flow-matching model that synthesizes coherent compositions based on domain-specific priors, enabling diverse and context-aware generations. Additionally, we present a LoRA-based fine-tuning strategy that significantly improves prompt adherence in IP-Adapter+ for a given task, addressing its common trade-off between reconstruction quality and prompt adherence.

A fundamental bottleneck in human-AI collaboration is the "intention expression gap," the difficulty for humans to effectively convey complex, high-dimensional thoughts to AI. This challenge often traps users in inefficient trial-and-error loops and is exacerbated by the diverse expertise levels of users. We reframe this problem from passive instruction following to a Socratic collaboration paradigm, proposing an agent that actively probes for information to resolve its uncertainty about user intent. we name the proposed agent Nous, trained to acquire proficiency in this inquiry policy. The core mechanism of Nous is a training framework grounded in the first principles of information theory. Within this framework, we define the information gain from dialogue as an intrinsic reward signal, which is fundamentally equivalent to the reduction of Shannon entropy over a structured task space. This reward design enables us to avoid reliance on costly human preference annotations or external reward models. To validate our framework, we develop an automated simulation pipeline to generate a large-scale, preference-based dataset for the challenging task of scientific diagram generation. Comprehensive experiments, including ablations, subjective and objective evaluations, and tests across user expertise levels, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Nous achieves leading efficiency and output quality, while remaining robust to varying user expertise. Moreover, its design is domain-agnostic, and we show evidence of generalization beyond diagram generation. Experimental results prove that our work offers a principled, scalable, and adaptive paradigm for resolving uncertainty about user intent in complex human-AI collaboration.

Exposure to large language model output is rapidly increasing. How will seeing AI-generated ideas affect human ideas? We conducted an experiment (800+ participants, 40+ countries) where participants viewed creative ideas that were from ChatGPT or prior experimental participants and then brainstormed their own idea. We varied the number of AI-generated examples (none, low, or high exposure) and if the examples were labeled as 'AI' (disclosure). Our dynamic experiment design -- ideas from prior participants in an experimental condition are used as stimuli for future participants in the same experimental condition -- mimics the interdependent process of cultural creation: creative ideas are built upon prior ideas. Hence, we capture the compounding effects of having LLMs 'in the culture loop'. We find that high AI exposure (but not low AI exposure) did not affect the creativity of individual ideas but did increase the average amount and rate of change of collective idea diversity. AI made ideas different, not better. There were no main effects of disclosure. We also found that self-reported creative people were less influenced by knowing an idea was from AI, and that participants were more likely to knowingly adopt AI ideas when the task was difficult. Our findings suggest that introducing AI ideas into society may increase collective diversity but not individual creativity.

Subject-driven image generation aims to synthesize novel scenes that faithfully preserve subject identity from reference images while adhering to textual guidance, yet existing methods struggle with a critical trade-off between fidelity and efficiency. Tuning-based approaches rely on time-consuming and resource-intensive subject-specific optimization, while zero-shot methods fail to maintain adequate subject consistency. In this work, we propose FreeGraftor, a training-free framework that addresses these limitations through cross-image feature grafting. Specifically, FreeGraftor employs semantic matching and position-constrained attention fusion to transfer visual details from reference subjects to the generated image. Additionally, our framework incorporates a novel noise initialization strategy to preserve geometry priors of reference subjects for robust feature matching. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method enables precise subject identity transfer while maintaining text-aligned scene synthesis. Without requiring model fine-tuning or additional training, FreeGraftor significantly outperforms existing zero-shot and training-free approaches in both subject fidelity and text alignment. Furthermore, our framework can seamlessly extend to multi-subject generation, making it practical for real-world deployment. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nihukat/FreeGraftor.

For an artist or a graphic designer, the spatial layout of a scene is a critical design choice. However, existing text-to-image diffusion models provide limited support for incorporating spatial information. This paper introduces Composite Diffusion as a means for artists to generate high-quality images by composing from the sub-scenes. The artists can specify the arrangement of these sub-scenes through a flexible free-form segment layout. They can describe the content of each sub-scene primarily using natural text and additionally by utilizing reference images or control inputs such as line art, scribbles, human pose, canny edges, and more. We provide a comprehensive and modular method for Composite Diffusion that enables alternative ways of generating, composing, and harmonizing sub-scenes. Further, we wish to evaluate the composite image for effectiveness in both image quality and achieving the artist's intent. We argue that existing image quality metrics lack a holistic evaluation of image composites. To address this, we propose novel quality criteria especially relevant to composite generation. We believe that our approach provides an intuitive method of art creation. Through extensive user surveys, quantitative and qualitative analysis, we show how it achieves greater spatial, semantic, and creative control over image generation. In addition, our methods do not need to retrain or modify the architecture of the base diffusion models and can work in a plug-and-play manner with the fine-tuned models.

The current advances in generative AI for learning large neural network models with the capability to produce essays, images, music and even 3D assets from text prompts create opportunities for a manifold of disciplines. In the present paper, we study the potential of deep text-to-3D models in the engineering domain, with focus on the chances and challenges when integrating and interacting with 3D assets in computational simulation-based design optimization. In contrast to traditional design optimization of 3D geometries that often searches for the optimum designs using numerical representations, such as B-Spline surface or deformation parameters in vehicle aerodynamic optimization, natural language challenges the optimization framework by requiring a different interpretation of variation operators while at the same time may ease and motivate the human user interaction. Here, we propose and realize a fully automated evolutionary design optimization framework using Shap-E, a recently published text-to-3D asset network by OpenAI, in the context of aerodynamic vehicle optimization. For representing text prompts in the evolutionary optimization, we evaluate (a) a bag-of-words approach based on prompt templates and Wordnet samples, and (b) a tokenisation approach based on prompt templates and the byte pair encoding method from GPT4. Our main findings from the optimizations indicate that, first, it is important to ensure that the designs generated from prompts are within the object class of application, i.e. diverse and novel designs need to be realistic, and, second, that more research is required to develop methods where the strength of text prompt variations and the resulting variations of the 3D designs share causal relations to some degree to improve the optimization.

Human-object centric video personalization (HOCVP) is a core task within subject-driven video generation. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations. First, most approaches focusing on inter-subject personalization still struggle to strike a balance between high subject fidelity and accurate interaction patterns between humans and diverse objects, especially when objects represent abstract concepts such as logos. Second, while intra-subject references (e.g., OCR maps, multi-view inputs) are expected to enhance subject fidelity, most existing works lack mechanisms to understand such latent correspondence. To address both challenges, we propose HOMIE, an HOCVP framework that tackles both inter- and intra-subject input settings in a unified manner. Compared to previous approaches, HOMIE proposes a better MLLM integration strategy to extract knowledge of reference-level relationships without compromising the controllability of text encoders or incurring costly re-alignment. Specifically, we introduce global multimodal guidance within self-attention to better align MLLM-derived semantic features with VAE tokens. Furthermore, we propose modality-reference embedding to differentiate tokens from MLLM features and VAE tokens and associate intra-subject reference image tokens. Extensive experiments validate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various HOCVP tasks. Project Page: https://yiyangcai.github.io/homie-page.github.io/

In recent years, Large Language Models have garnered significant attention for their strong performance in various natural language tasks, such as machine translation and question answering. These models demonstrate an impressive ability to generalize across diverse tasks. However, their effectiveness in tackling domain-specific tasks, such as financial sentiment analysis and monetary policy understanding, remains a topic of debate, as these tasks often require specialized knowledge and precise reasoning. To address such challenges, researchers design various prompts to unlock the models' abilities. By carefully crafting input prompts, researchers can guide these models to produce more accurate responses. Consequently, prompt engineering has become a key focus of study. Despite the advancements in both models and prompt engineering, the relationship between the two-specifically, how prompt design impacts models' ability to perform domain-specific tasks-remains underexplored. This paper aims to bridge this research gap.

Understanding of video creativity and content often varies among individuals, with differences in focal points and cognitive levels across different ages, experiences, and genders. There is currently a lack of research in this area, and most existing benchmarks suffer from several drawbacks: 1) a limited number of modalities and answers with restrictive length; 2) the content and scenarios within the videos are excessively monotonous, transmitting allegories and emotions that are overly simplistic. To bridge the gap to real-world applications, we introduce a large-scale Subjective Response Indicators for Advertisement Videos dataset, namely SRI-ADV. Specifically, we collected real changes in Electroencephalographic (EEG) and eye-tracking regions from different demographics while they viewed identical video content. Utilizing this multi-modal dataset, we developed tasks and protocols to analyze and evaluate the extent of cognitive understanding of video content among different users. Along with the dataset, we designed a Hypergraph Multi-modal Large Language Model (HMLLM) to explore the associations among different demographics, video elements, EEG, and eye-tracking indicators. HMLLM could bridge semantic gaps across rich modalities and integrate information beyond different modalities to perform logical reasoning. Extensive experimental evaluations on SRI-ADV and other additional video-based generative performance benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The codes and dataset will be released at https://github.com/suay1113/HMLLM.

Recent studies in text-to-image customization show great success in generating personalized object variants given several images of a subject. While existing methods focus more on preserving the identity of the subject, they often fall short of controlling the spatial relationship between objects. In this work, we introduce GroundingBooth, a framework that achieves zero-shot instance-level spatial grounding on both foreground subjects and background objects in the text-to-image customization task. Our proposed text-image grounding module and masked cross-attention layer allow us to generate personalized images with both accurate layout alignment and identity preservation while maintaining text-image coherence. With such layout control, our model inherently enables the customization of multiple subjects at once. Our model is evaluated on both layout-guided image synthesis and reference-based customization tasks, showing strong results compared to existing methods. Our work is the first work to achieve a joint grounding on both subject-driven foreground generation and text-driven background generation.

Mediated by today's visual displays, information space allows users to discover, access and interact with a wide range of digital and physical information. The information presented in this space may be digital, physical or a blend of both, and appear across different dimensions - such as texts, images, 3D content and physical objects embedded within real-world environment. Navigating within the information space often involves interacting with mixed-dimensional entities, visually represented in both 2D and 3D. At times, interactions also involve transitioning among entities represented in different dimensions. We introduce the concept of mixed-dimensional information space, encompassing entities represented in both 2D and 3D. Interactions within the mixed-dimensional information space should be seamless and efficient: users should be able to focus on their primary tasks without being distracted by interactions with or transitions between entities. While incorporating 3D representations into the mixed-dimensional information space offers intuitive and immersive ways to interact with complex information, it is important to address potential seams and inefficiencies that arise while interacting with both 2D and 3D entities. This dissertation introduces new interactive techniques and systems to realize seamless and efficient interactions within the mixed-dimensional information space. This dissertation introduces three interactive systems: MemoVis which aims to use emergent generative AI to help users create reference images for 3D design feedback; PaperToPlace which demonstrates how paper-based instruction documents can be transformed and spatialized into a context-aware MR experience; and VRContour which explores how contour delineation workflow can be brought into VR.

Recommender systems are the algorithms which select, filter, and personalize content across many of the worlds largest platforms and apps. As such, their positive and negative effects on individuals and on societies have been extensively theorized and studied. Our overarching question is how to ensure that recommender systems enact the values of the individuals and societies that they serve. Addressing this question in a principled fashion requires technical knowledge of recommender design and operation, and also critically depends on insights from diverse fields including social science, ethics, economics, psychology, policy and law. This paper is a multidisciplinary effort to synthesize theory and practice from different perspectives, with the goal of providing a shared language, articulating current design approaches, and identifying open problems. It is not a comprehensive survey of this large space, but a set of highlights identified by our diverse author cohort. We collect a set of values that seem most relevant to recommender systems operating across different domains, then examine them from the perspectives of current industry practice, measurement, product design, and policy approaches. Important open problems include multi-stakeholder processes for defining values and resolving trade-offs, better values-driven measurements, recommender controls that people use, non-behavioral algorithmic feedback, optimization for long-term outcomes, causal inference of recommender effects, academic-industry research collaborations, and interdisciplinary policy-making.

Subject-driven generation is a critical task in creative AI; yet current state-of-the-art methods present a stark trade-off. They either rely on computationally expensive, per-subject fine-tuning, sacrificing efficiency and zero-shot capability, or employ feed-forward architectures built on diffusion models, which are inherently plagued by slow inference speeds. Visual Auto-Regressive (VAR) models are renowned for their rapid sampling speeds and strong generative quality, making them an ideal yet underexplored foundation for resolving this tension. To bridge this gap, we introduce EchoGen, a pioneering framework that empowers VAR models with subject-driven generation capabilities. The core design of EchoGen is an effective dual-path injection strategy that disentangles a subject's high-level semantic identity from its low-level fine-grained details, enabling enhanced controllability and fidelity. We employ a semantic encoder to extract the subject's abstract identity, which is injected through decoupled cross-attention to guide the overall composition. Concurrently, a content encoder captures intricate visual details, which are integrated via a multi-modal attention mechanism to ensure high-fidelity texture and structural preservation. To the best of our knowledge, EchoGen is the first feed-forward subject-driven framework built upon VAR models. Both quantitative and qualitative results substantiate our design, demonstrating that EchoGen achieves subject fidelity and image quality comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods with significantly lower sampling latency. Code and models will be released soon.

Templates serve as a good starting point to implement a design (e.g., banner, slide) but it takes great effort from designers to manually create. In this paper, we present Desigen, an automatic template creation pipeline which generates background images as well as harmonious layout elements over the background. Different from natural images, a background image should preserve enough non-salient space for the overlaying layout elements. To equip existing advanced diffusion-based models with stronger spatial control, we propose two simple but effective techniques to constrain the saliency distribution and reduce the attention weight in desired regions during the background generation process. Then conditioned on the background, we synthesize the layout with a Transformer-based autoregressive generator. To achieve a more harmonious composition, we propose an iterative inference strategy to adjust the synthesized background and layout in multiple rounds. We constructed a design dataset with more than 40k advertisement banners to verify our approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed pipeline generates high-quality templates comparable to human designers. More than a single-page design, we further show an application of presentation generation that outputs a set of theme-consistent slides. The data and code are available at https://whaohan.github.io/desigen.

Advertising banners are critical for capturing user attention and enhancing advertising campaign effectiveness. Creating aesthetically pleasing banner designs while conveying the campaign messages is challenging due to the large search space involving multiple design elements. Additionally, advertisers need multiple sizes for different displays and various versions to target different sectors of audiences. Since design is intrinsically an iterative and subjective process, flexible editability is also in high demand for practical usage. While current models have served as assistants to human designers in various design tasks, they typically handle only segments of the creative design process or produce pixel-based outputs that limit editability. This paper introduces a training-free framework for fully automated banner ad design creation, enabling frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to streamline the production of effective banners with minimal manual effort across diverse marketing contexts. We present BannerAgency, an MLLM agent system that collaborates with advertisers to understand their brand identity and banner objectives, generates matching background images, creates blueprints for foreground design elements, and renders the final creatives as editable components in Figma or SVG formats rather than static pixels. To facilitate evaluation and future research, we introduce BannerRequest400, a benchmark featuring 100 unique logos paired with 400 diverse banner requests. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, emphasizing the quality of the generated banner designs, their adaptability to various banner requests, and their strong editability enabled by this component-based approach.

Completely randomized experiments, originally developed by Fisher and Neyman in the 1930s, are still widely used in practice, even in online experimentation. However, such designs are of limited value for answering standard questions in marketplaces, where multiple populations of agents interact strategically, leading to complex patterns of spillover effects. In this paper, we derive the finite-sample properties of tractable estimators for "Simple Multiple Randomization Designs" (SMRDs), a new class of experimental designs which account for complex spillover effects in randomized experiments. Our derivations are obtained under a natural and general form of cross-unit interference, which we call "local interference". We discuss the estimation of main effects, direct effects, and spillovers, and present associated central limit theorems.

We propose Framer for interactive frame interpolation, which targets producing smoothly transitioning frames between two images as per user creativity. Concretely, besides taking the start and end frames as inputs, our approach supports customizing the transition process by tailoring the trajectory of some selected keypoints. Such a design enjoys two clear benefits. First, incorporating human interaction mitigates the issue arising from numerous possibilities of transforming one image to another, and in turn enables finer control of local motions. Second, as the most basic form of interaction, keypoints help establish the correspondence across frames, enhancing the model to handle challenging cases (e.g., objects on the start and end frames are of different shapes and styles). It is noteworthy that our system also offers an "autopilot" mode, where we introduce a module to estimate the keypoints and refine the trajectory automatically, to simplify the usage in practice. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the appealing performance of Framer on various applications, such as image morphing, time-lapse video generation, cartoon interpolation, etc. The code, the model, and the interface will be released to facilitate further research.

Existing literature typically treats style-driven and subject-driven generation as two disjoint tasks: the former prioritizes stylistic similarity, whereas the latter insists on subject consistency, resulting in an apparent antagonism. We argue that both objectives can be unified under a single framework because they ultimately concern the disentanglement and re-composition of content and style, a long-standing theme in style-driven research. To this end, we present USO, a Unified Style-Subject Optimized customization model. First, we construct a large-scale triplet dataset consisting of content images, style images, and their corresponding stylized content images. Second, we introduce a disentangled learning scheme that simultaneously aligns style features and disentangles content from style through two complementary objectives, style-alignment training and content-style disentanglement training. Third, we incorporate a style reward-learning paradigm denoted as SRL to further enhance the model's performance. Finally, we release USO-Bench, the first benchmark that jointly evaluates style similarity and subject fidelity across multiple metrics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that USO achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models along both dimensions of subject consistency and style similarity. Code and model: https://github.com/bytedance/USO

Despite the promising progress in subject-driven image generation, current models often deviate from the reference identities and struggle in complex scenes with multiple subjects. To address this challenge, we introduce OpenSubject, a video-derived large-scale corpus with 2.5M samples and 4.35M images for subject-driven generation and manipulation. The dataset is built with a four-stage pipeline that exploits cross-frame identity priors. (i) Video Curation. We apply resolution and aesthetic filtering to obtain high-quality clips. (ii) Cross-Frame Subject Mining and Pairing. We utilize vision-language model (VLM)-based category consensus, local grounding, and diversity-aware pairing to select image pairs. (iii) Identity-Preserving Reference Image Synthesis. We introduce segmentation map-guided outpainting to synthesize the input images for subject-driven generation and box-guided inpainting to generate input images for subject-driven manipulation, together with geometry-aware augmentations and irregular boundary erosion. (iv) Verification and Captioning. We utilize a VLM to validate synthesized samples, re-synthesize failed samples based on stage (iii), and then construct short and long captions. In addition, we introduce a benchmark covering subject-driven generation and manipulation, and then evaluate identity fidelity, prompt adherence, manipulation consistency, and background consistency with a VLM judge. Extensive experiments show that training with OpenSubject improves generation and manipulation performance, particularly in complex scenes.

Storytelling tasks involving generating consistent subjects have gained significant attention recently. However, existing methods, whether training-free or training-based, continue to face challenges in maintaining subject consistency due to the lack of fine-grained guidance and inter-frame interaction. Additionally, the scarcity of high-quality data in this field makes it difficult to precisely control storytelling tasks, including the subject's position, appearance, clothing, expression, and posture, thereby hindering further advancements. In this paper, we demonstrate that layout conditions, such as the subject's position and detailed attributes, effectively facilitate fine-grained interactions between frames. This not only strengthens the consistency of the generated frame sequence but also allows for precise control over the subject's position, appearance, and other key details. Building on this, we introduce an advanced storytelling task: Layout-Togglable Storytelling, which enables precise subject control by incorporating layout conditions. To address the lack of high-quality datasets with layout annotations for this task, we develop Lay2Story-1M, which contains over 1 million 720p and higher-resolution images, processed from approximately 11,300 hours of cartoon videos. Building on Lay2Story-1M, we create Lay2Story-Bench, a benchmark with 3,000 prompts designed to evaluate the performance of different methods on this task. Furthermore, we propose Lay2Story, a robust framework based on the Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) architecture for Layout-Togglable Storytelling tasks. Through both qualitative and quantitative experiments, we find that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques, achieving the best results in terms of consistency, semantic correlation, and aesthetic quality.

Graphic design is essential for visual communication with layouts being fundamental to composing attractive designs. Layout generation differs from pixel-level image synthesis and is unique in terms of the requirement of mutual relations among the desired components. We propose a method for design layout generation that can satisfy user-specified constraints. The proposed neural design network (NDN) consists of three modules. The first module predicts a graph with complete relations from a graph with user-specified relations. The second module generates a layout from the predicted graph. Finally, the third module fine-tunes the predicted layout. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the generated layouts are visually similar to real design layouts. We also construct real designs based on predicted layouts for a better understanding of the visual quality. Finally, we demonstrate a practical application on layout recommendation.

Real-world design tasks - such as picture book creation, film storyboard development using character sets, photo retouching, visual effects, and font transfer - are highly diverse and complex, requiring deep interpretation and extraction of various elements from instructions, descriptions, and reference images. The resulting images often implicitly capture key features from references or user inputs, making it challenging to develop models that can effectively address such varied tasks. While existing visual generative models can produce high-quality images based on prompts, they face significant limitations in professional design scenarios that involve varied forms and multiple inputs and outputs, even when enhanced with adapters like ControlNets and LoRAs. To address this, we introduce IDEA-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing 100 real-world design tasks, including rendering, visual effects, storyboarding, picture books, fonts, style-based, and identity-preserving generation, with 275 test cases to thoroughly evaluate a model's general-purpose generation capabilities. Notably, even the best-performing model only achieves 22.48 on IDEA-Bench, while the best general-purpose model only achieves 6.81. We provide a detailed analysis of these results, highlighting the inherent challenges and providing actionable directions for improvement. Additionally, we provide a subset of 18 representative tasks equipped with multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based auto-evaluation techniques to facilitate rapid model development and comparison. We releases the benchmark data, evaluation toolkits, and an online leaderboard at https://github.com/ali-vilab/IDEA-Bench, aiming to drive the advancement of generative models toward more versatile and applicable intelligent design systems.

Prompting and steering techniques are well established in general-purpose generative AI, yet assistive visual question answering (VQA) tools for blind users still follow rigid interaction patterns with limited opportunities for customization. User control can be helpful when system responses are misaligned with their goals and contexts, a gap that becomes especially consequential for blind users that may rely on these systems for access. We invite 11 blind users to customize their interactions with a real-world conversational VQA system. Drawing on 418 interactions, reflections, and post-study interviews, we analyze prompting-based techniques participants adopted, including those introduced in the study and those developed independently in real-world settings. VQA interactions were often lengthy: participants averaged 3 turns, sometimes up to 21, with input text typically tenfold shorter than the responses they heard. Built on state-of-the-art LLMs, the system lacked verbosity controls, was limited in estimating distance in space and time, relied on inaccessible image framing, and offered little to no camera guidance. We discuss how customization techniques such as prompt engineering can help participants work around these limitations. Alongside a new publicly available dataset, we offer insights for interaction design at both query and system levels.

Diffusion models excel at text-to-image generation, especially in subject-driven generation for personalized images. However, existing methods are inefficient due to the subject-specific fine-tuning, which is computationally intensive and hampers efficient deployment. Moreover, existing methods struggle with multi-subject generation as they often blend features among subjects. We present FastComposer which enables efficient, personalized, multi-subject text-to-image generation without fine-tuning. FastComposer uses subject embeddings extracted by an image encoder to augment the generic text conditioning in diffusion models, enabling personalized image generation based on subject images and textual instructions with only forward passes. To address the identity blending problem in the multi-subject generation, FastComposer proposes cross-attention localization supervision during training, enforcing the attention of reference subjects localized to the correct regions in the target images. Naively conditioning on subject embeddings results in subject overfitting. FastComposer proposes delayed subject conditioning in the denoising step to maintain both identity and editability in subject-driven image generation. FastComposer generates images of multiple unseen individuals with different styles, actions, and contexts. It achieves 300times-2500times speedup compared to fine-tuning-based methods and requires zero extra storage for new subjects. FastComposer paves the way for efficient, personalized, and high-quality multi-subject image creation. Code, model, and dataset are available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/fastcomposer.

Deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) are increasingly adopted and deployed by analysts without formal training in NLP or machine learning (ML). However, the documentation intended to convey the model's details and appropriate use is tailored primarily to individuals with ML or NLP expertise. To address this gap, we conduct a design inquiry into interactive model cards, which augment traditionally static model cards with affordances for exploring model documentation and interacting with the models themselves. Our investigation consists of an initial conceptual study with experts in ML, NLP, and AI Ethics, followed by a separate evaluative study with non-expert analysts who use ML models in their work. Using a semi-structured interview format coupled with a think-aloud protocol, we collected feedback from a total of 30 participants who engaged with different versions of standard and interactive model cards. Through a thematic analysis of the collected data, we identified several conceptual dimensions that summarize the strengths and limitations of standard and interactive model cards, including: stakeholders; design; guidance; understandability & interpretability; sensemaking & skepticism; and trust & safety. Our findings demonstrate the importance of carefully considered design and interactivity for orienting and supporting non-expert analysts using deep learning models, along with a need for consideration of broader sociotechnical contexts and organizational dynamics. We have also identified design elements, such as language, visual cues, and warnings, among others, that support interactivity and make non-interactive content accessible. We summarize our findings as design guidelines and discuss their implications for a human-centered approach towards AI/ML documentation.

Effective editing of personal content holds a pivotal role in enabling individuals to express their creativity, weaving captivating narratives within their visual stories, and elevate the overall quality and impact of their visual content. Therefore, in this work, we introduce SwapAnything, a novel framework that can swap any objects in an image with personalized concepts given by the reference, while keeping the context unchanged. Compared with existing methods for personalized subject swapping, SwapAnything has three unique advantages: (1) precise control of arbitrary objects and parts rather than the main subject, (2) more faithful preservation of context pixels, (3) better adaptation of the personalized concept to the image. First, we propose targeted variable swapping to apply region control over latent feature maps and swap masked variables for faithful context preservation and initial semantic concept swapping. Then, we introduce appearance adaptation, to seamlessly adapt the semantic concept into the original image in terms of target location, shape, style, and content during the image generation process. Extensive results on both human and automatic evaluation demonstrate significant improvements of our approach over baseline methods on personalized swapping. Furthermore, SwapAnything shows its precise and faithful swapping abilities across single object, multiple objects, partial object, and cross-domain swapping tasks. SwapAnything also achieves great performance on text-based swapping and tasks beyond swapping such as object insertion.

Current mental-health conversational systems are usually based on fixed, generic dialogue patterns. This paper proposes an adaptive framework based on large language models that aims to personalize therapeutic interaction according to a user's psychological state, quantified with the Acceptance of Illness Scale (AIS). The framework defines three specialized agents, L, M, and H, each linked to a different level of illness acceptance, and adjusts conversational behavior over time using continuous feedback signals. The AIS-stratified architecture is treated as a diegetic prototype placed in a plausible near-future setting and examined through the method of design fiction. By embedding the architecture in narrative scenarios, the study explores how such agents might influence access to care and therapeutic relationship. The goal is to show how clinically informed personalization, technical feasibility, and speculative scenario analysis can together inform the responsible design of LLM-based companions for mental-health support.