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Aman Tyagi

Publications and source records attributed to Aman Tyagi.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

Beyond Trial-and-Error: Agentic Optimization for Image-to-Video Adherence

Modern black-box Image-to-Video (I2V) models offer powerful capabilities in automated content creation, yet their lack of fine-grained control and reliability presents significant challenges in professional workflows. Their inherent stochasticity causes minor variations in textual prompts or hyperparameters to yield drastically different outputs often necessitating inefficient, brute-force trial-and-error processes. To address these limitations, we introduce the ``Agentic Self-Improvement" framework, which reframes video synthesis into a closed-loop, goal-directed optimization. Our framework systematically navigates the generation parameter space using a novel two-stage approach. In the first stage, an iterative prompt optimization loop uses a multimodal Large Language Model (mLLM) to refine the input prompt. This refinement implements two automated evaluations: Davidsonian Scene Graph (DSG) queries ensure semantic adherence, and Common Mistake Questions (CMQ) for artifact detection. At the second stage, we use Bayesian optimization to efficiently co-optimize stochastic seeds and CFG scales. This search is guided by a suite of quality metrics, including the novel Video-Text Adherence (VTA) score derived from the DSG and CMQ evaluations. Our framework significantly outperforms unguided search methods: in human preference studies, videos generated via our agentic approach were strongly preferred over baseline outputs, achieving win rates up to 69\%. This work provides a practical and extensible methodology for enhancing the predictability and control of state-of-the-art video generation models, moving the field beyond speculative curiosities toward reliable, production-ready tools.

cs.CV

MatViX: Multimodal Information Extraction from Visually Rich Articles

Multimodal information extraction (MIE) is crucial for scientific literature, where valuable data is often spread across text, figures, and tables. In materials science, extracting structured information from research articles can accelerate the discovery of new materials. However, the multimodal nature and complex interconnections of scientific content present challenges for traditional text-based methods. We introduce \textsc{MatViX}, a benchmark consisting of $324$ full-length research articles and $1,688$ complex structured JSON files, carefully curated by domain experts. These JSON files are extracted from text, tables, and figures in full-length documents, providing a comprehensive challenge for MIE. We introduce an evaluation method to assess the accuracy of curve similarity and the alignment of hierarchical structures. Additionally, we benchmark vision-language models (VLMs) in a zero-shot manner, capable of processing long contexts and multimodal inputs, and show that using a specialized model (DePlot) can improve performance in extracting curves. Our results demonstrate significant room for improvement in current models. Our dataset and evaluation code are available\footnote{\url{https://matvix-bench.github.io/}}.

cs.CL

Dynamic Contexts for Generating Suggestion Questions in RAG Based Conversational Systems

When interacting with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based conversational agents, the users must carefully craft their queries to be understood correctly. Yet, understanding the system's capabilities can be challenging for the users, leading to ambiguous questions that necessitate further clarification. This work aims to bridge the gap by developing a suggestion question generator. To generate suggestion questions, our approach involves utilizing dynamic context, which includes both dynamic few-shot examples and dynamically retrieved contexts. Through experiments, we show that the dynamic contexts approach can generate better suggestion questions as compared to other prompting approaches.

cs.CL

Climate Change Conspiracy Theories on Social Media

One of the critical emerging challenges in climate change communication is the prevalence of conspiracy theories. This paper discusses some of the major conspiracy theories related to climate change found in a large Twitter corpus. We use a state-of-the-art stance detection method to find whether conspiracy theories are more popular among Disbelievers or Believers of climate change. We then analyze which conspiracy theory is more popular than the others and how popularity changes with climate change belief. We find that Disbelievers of climate change are overwhelmingly responsible for sharing messages with conspiracy theory-related keywords, and not all conspiracy theories are equally shared. Lastly, we discuss the implications of our findings for climate change communication.

cs.SI

Characterizing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Competing Vaccination Communities

Public health practitioners and policy makers grapple with the challenge of devising effective message-based interventions for debunking public health misinformation in cyber communities. "Framing" and "personalization" of the message is one of the key features for devising a persuasive messaging strategy. For an effective health communication, it is imperative to focus on "preference-based framing" where the preferences of the target sub-community are taken into consideration. To achieve that, it is important to understand and hence characterize the target sub-communities in terms of their social interactions. In the context of health-related misinformation, vaccination remains to be the most prevalent topic of discord. Hence, in this paper, we conduct a sociolinguistic analysis of the two competing vaccination communities on Twitter: "pro-vaxxers" or individuals who believe in the effectiveness of vaccinations, and "anti-vaxxers" or individuals who are opposed to vaccinations. Our data analysis show significant linguistic variation between the two communities in terms of their usage of linguistic intensifiers, pronouns, and uncertainty words. Our network-level analysis show significant differences between the two communities in terms of their network density, echo-chamberness, and the EI index. We hypothesize that these sociolinguistic differences can be used as proxies to characterize and understand these communities to devise better message interventions.

cs.SI

Affective Polarization in Online Climate Change Discourse on Twitter

Online social media has become an important platform to organize around different socio-cultural and political topics. An extensive scholarship has discussed how people are divided into echo-chamber-like groups. However, there is a lack of work related to quantifying hostile communication or \textit{affective polarization} between two competing groups. This paper proposes a systematic, network-based methodology for examining affective polarization in online conversations. Further, we apply our framework to 100 weeks of Twitter discourse about climate change. We find that deniers of climate change (Disbelievers) are more hostile towards people who believe (Believers) in the anthropogenic cause of climate change than vice versa. Moreover, Disbelievers use more words and hashtags related to natural disasters during more hostile weeks as compared to Believers. These findings bear implications for studying affective polarization in online discourse, especially concerning the subject of climate change. Lastly, we discuss our findings in the context of increasingly important climate change communication research.

cs.SI

Polarizing Tweets on Climate Change

We introduce a framework to analyze the conversation between two competing groups of Twitter users, one who believe in the anthropogenic causes of climate change (Believers) and a second who are skeptical (Disbelievers). As a case study, we use Climate Change related tweets during the United Nation's (UN) Climate Change Conference - COP24 (2018), Katowice, Poland. We find that both Disbelievers and Believers talk within their group more than with the other group; this is more so the case for Disbelievers than for Believers. The Disbeliever messages focused more on attacking those personalities that believe in the anthropogenic causes of climate change. On the other hand, Believer messages focused on calls to combat climate change. We find that in both Disbelievers and Believers bot-like accounts were equally active and that unlike Believers, Disbelievers get their news from a concentrated number of news sources.

cs.SI

A Computational Analysis of Polarization on Indian and Pakistani Social Media

Between February 14, 2019 and March 4, 2019, a terrorist attack in Pulwama, Kashmir followed by retaliatory airstrikes led to rising tensions between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries. In this work, we examine polarizing messaging on Twitter during these events, particularly focusing on the positions of Indian and Pakistani politicians. We use a label propagation technique focused on hashtag co-occurrences to find polarizing tweets and users. Our analysis reveals that politicians in the ruling political party in India (BJP) used polarized hashtags and called for escalation of conflict more so than politicians from other parties. Our work offers the first analysis of how escalating tensions between India and Pakistan manifest on Twitter and provides a framework for studying polarizing messages.

cs.SI