arXiv subjects

Dingzeyu Li

Publications and source records attributed to Dingzeyu Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Sidekick: Designing Communication for Effective Multitasking with Computer Use Agents

Computer Use Agents (CUAs) can autonomously execute complex, multi-step tasks within GUIs, enhancing efficiency through parallel multitasking. However, our formative studies with CUA experts and GenAI users indicated that current feedback is primarily text-based, requiring sustained attention to monitor progress and offering limited visibility to trace past GUI interactions. Based on the findings, we developed a prototype system, Sidekick, for communicating CUAs' status with multimodal feedback across different stages of interaction: (i) When CUAs run in the background, Sidekick signals its execution state through ambient cues. (ii) Upon resuming interaction with CUAs, Sidekick provides multimodal summaries of completed actions to support rapid context resumption. (iii) When CUAs operate in the foreground, Sidekick enhances transparency by verbalizing and visualizing the agent's reasoning. A study with 30 participants demonstrated that Sidekick significantly improved multitasking performance with CUAs compared to baseline systems that presented textual feedback either in a typical chat or in an ambient display. Sidekick supported progress awareness, and error and action traceability more effectively. Finally, we demonstrate the promise of Sidekick through several example applications, and discuss implications for long-horizon human-agent collaboration.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

A Text-Native Interface for Generative Video Authoring

Everyone can write their stories in freeform text format -- it's something we all learn in school. Yet storytelling via video requires one to learn specialized and complicated tools. In this paper, we introduce Doki, a text-native interface for generative video authoring, aligning video creation with the natural process of text writing. In Doki, writing text is the primary interaction: within a single document, users define assets, structure scenes, create shots, refine edits, and add audio. We articulate the design principles of this text-first approach and demonstrate Doki's capabilities through a series of examples. To evaluate its real-world use, we conducted a week-long deployment study with participants of varying expertise in video authoring. This work contributes a fundamental shift in generative video interfaces, demonstrating a powerful and accessible new way to craft visual stories.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

VidTune: Creating Video Soundtracks with Generative Music and Contextual Thumbnails

Music shapes the tone of videos, yet creators often struggle to find soundtracks that match their video's mood and narrative. Recent text-to-music models let creators generate music from text prompts, but our formative study (N=8) shows creators struggle to construct diverse prompts, quickly review and compare tracks, and understand their impact on the video. We present VidTune, a system that supports soundtrack creation by generating diverse music options from a creator's prompt and producing contextual thumbnails for rapid review. VidTune extracts representative video subjects to ground thumbnails in context, maps each track's valence and energy onto visual cues like color and brightness, and depicts prominent genres and instruments. Creators can refine tracks through natural language edits, which VidTune expands into new generations. In a controlled user study (N=12) and an exploratory case study (N=6), participants found VidTune helpful for efficiently reviewing and comparing music options and described the process as playful and enriching.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Rewriting Video: Text-Driven Reauthoring of Video Footage

Video is a powerful medium for communication and storytelling, yet reauthoring existing footage remains challenging. Even simple edits often demand expertise, time, and careful planning, constraining how creators envision and shape their narratives. Recent advances in generative AI suggest a new paradigm: what if editing a video were as straightforward as rewriting text? To investigate this, we present a tech probe and a study on text-driven video reauthoring. Our approach involves two technical contributions: (1) a generative reconstruction algorithm that reverse-engineers video into an editable text prompt, and (2) an interactive probe, Rewrite Kit, that allows creators to manipulate these prompts. A technical evaluation of the algorithm reveals a critical human-AI perceptual gap. A probe study with 12 creators surfaced novel use cases such as virtual reshooting, synthetic continuity, and aesthetic restyling. It also highlighted key tensions around coherence, control, and creative alignment in this new paradigm. Our work contributes empirical insights into the opportunities and challenges of text-driven video reauthoring, offering design implications for future co-creative video tools.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

SweeperBot: Making 3D Browsing Accessible through View Analysis and Visual Question Answering

Accessing 3D models remains challenging for Screen Reader (SR) users. While some existing 3D viewers allow creators to provide alternative text, they often lack sufficient detail about the 3D models. Grounded on a formative study, this paper introduces SweeperBot, a system that enables SR users to leverage visual question answering to explore and compare 3D models. SweeperBot answers SR users' visual questions by combining an optimal view selection technique with the strength of generative- and recognition-based foundation models. An expert review with 10 Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) users with SR experience demonstrated the feasibility of using SweeperBot to assist BLV users in exploring and comparing 3D models. The quality of the descriptions generated by SweeperBot was validated by a second survey study with 30 sighted participants.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Morae: Proactively Pausing UI Agents for User Choices

User interface (UI) agents promise to make inaccessible or complex UIs easier to access for blind and low-vision (BLV) users. However, current UI agents typically perform tasks end-to-end without involving users in critical choices or making them aware of important contextual information, thus reducing user agency. For example, in our field study, a BLV participant asked to buy the cheapest available sparkling water, and the agent automatically chose one from several equally priced options, without mentioning alternative products with different flavors or better ratings. To address this problem, we introduce Morae, a UI agent that automatically identifies decision points during task execution and pauses so that users can make choices. Morae uses large multimodal models to interpret user queries alongside UI code and screenshots, and prompt users for clarification when there is a choice to be made. In a study over real-world web tasks with BLV participants, Morae helped users complete more tasks and select options that better matched their preferences, as compared to baseline agents, including OpenAI Operator. More broadly, this work exemplifies a mixed-initiative approach in which users benefit from the automation of UI agents while being able to express their preferences.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Facilitating Longitudinal Interaction Studies of AI Systems

UIST researchers develop tools to address user challenges. However, user interactions with AI evolve over time through learning, adaptation, and repurposing, making one time evaluations insufficient. Capturing these dynamics requires longer-term studies, but challenges in deployment, evaluation design, and data collection have made such longitudinal research difficult to implement. Our workshop aims to tackle these challenges and prepare researchers with practical strategies for longitudinal studies. The workshop includes a keynote, panel discussions, and interactive breakout groups for discussion and hands-on protocol design and tool prototyping sessions. We seek to foster a community around longitudinal system research and promote it as a more embraced method for designing, building, and evaluating UIST tools.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Schemex: Discovering Structural Abstractions from Examples

Creative and communicative work is often underpinned by implicit structures, such as the Hero's Journey in storytelling, design patterns in software, or chord progressions in music. People often learn these structures from examples - a process known as schema induction. However, because schemas are abstract and implicit, they are difficult to discover: shared structural patterns are obscured by surface-level variation, and balancing generality with specificity is challenging. We present Schemex, an interactive AI workflow that systematically supports schema induction by decomposing it into three tractable stages: clustering examples, abstracting candidate schemas, and contrastively refining them by generating new instances and comparing against originals. Studies show that Schemex produces more actionable schemas than a frontier baseline without sacrificing generalizability, with participants uncovering deep and nuanced structural patterns. We also discuss design implications for the cognitive role of interactive process in structure discovery.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

VideoMix: Aggregating How-To Videos for Task-Oriented Learning

Tutorial videos are a valuable resource for people looking to learn new tasks. People often learn these skills by viewing multiple tutorial videos to get an overall understanding of a task by looking at different approaches to achieve the task. However, navigating through multiple videos can be time-consuming and mentally demanding as these videos are scattered and not easy to skim. We propose VideoMix, a system that helps users gain a holistic understanding of a how-to task by aggregating information from multiple videos on the task. Insights from our formative study (N=12) reveal that learners value understanding potential outcomes, required materials, alternative methods, and important details shared by different videos. Powered by a Vision-Language Model pipeline, VideoMix extracts and organizes this information, presenting concise textual summaries alongside relevant video clips, enabling users to quickly digest and navigate the content. A comparative user study (N=12) demonstrated that VideoMix enabled participants to gain a more comprehensive understanding of tasks with greater efficiency than a baseline video interface, where videos are viewed independently. Our findings highlight the potential of a task-oriented, multi-video approach where videos are organized around a shared goal, offering an enhanced alternative to conventional video-based learning.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

VideoDiff: Human-AI Video Co-Creation with Alternatives

To make an engaging video, people sequence interesting moments and add visuals such as B-rolls or text. While video editing requires time and effort, AI has recently shown strong potential to make editing easier through suggestions and automation. A key strength of generative models is their ability to quickly generate multiple variations, but when provided with many alternatives, creators struggle to compare them to find the best fit. We propose VideoDiff, an AI video editing tool designed for editing with alternatives. With VideoDiff, creators can generate and review multiple AI recommendations for each editing process: creating a rough cut, inserting B-rolls, and adding text effects. VideoDiff simplifies comparisons by aligning videos and highlighting differences through timelines, transcripts, and video previews. Creators have the flexibility to regenerate and refine AI suggestions as they compare alternatives. Our study participants (N=12) could easily compare and customize alternatives, creating more satisfying results.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

PodReels: Human-AI Co-Creation of Video Podcast Teasers

Video podcast teasers are short videos that can be shared on social media platforms to capture interest in the full episodes of a video podcast. These teasers enable long-form podcasters to reach new audiences and gain new followers. However, creating a compelling teaser from an hour-long episode is challenging. Selecting interesting clips requires significant mental effort; editing the chosen clips into a cohesive, well-produced teaser is time-consuming. To support the creation of video podcast teasers, we first investigate what makes a good teaser. We combine insights from both audience comments and creator interviews to determine a set of essential ingredients. We also identify a common workflow shared by creators during the process. Based on these findings, we introduce a human-AI co-creative tool called PodReels to assist video podcasters in creating teasers. Our user study shows that PodReels significantly reduces creators' mental demand and improves their efficiency in producing video podcast teasers.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Concept Weaver: Enabling Multi-Concept Fusion in Text-to-Image Models

While there has been significant progress in customizing text-to-image generation models, generating images that combine multiple personalized concepts remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Concept Weaver, a method for composing customized text-to-image diffusion models at inference time. Specifically, the method breaks the process into two steps: creating a template image aligned with the semantics of input prompts, and then personalizing the template using a concept fusion strategy. The fusion strategy incorporates the appearance of the target concepts into the template image while retaining its structural details. The results indicate that our method can generate multiple custom concepts with higher identity fidelity compared to alternative approaches. Furthermore, the method is shown to seamlessly handle more than two concepts and closely follow the semantic meaning of the input prompt without blending appearances across different subjects.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ReelFramer: Human-AI Co-Creation for News-to-Video Translation

Short videos on social media are the dominant way young people consume content. News outlets aim to reach audiences through news reels -- short videos conveying news -- but struggle to translate traditional journalistic formats into short, entertaining videos. To translate news into social media reels, we support journalists in reframing the narrative. In literature, narrative framing is a high-level structure that shapes the overall presentation of a story. We identified three narrative framings for reels that adapt social media norms but preserve news value, each with a different balance of information and entertainment. We introduce ReelFramer, a human-AI co-creative system that helps journalists translate print articles into scripts and storyboards. ReelFramer supports exploring multiple narrative framings to find one appropriate to the story. AI suggests foundational narrative details, including characters, plot, setting, and key information. ReelFramer also supports visual framing; AI suggests character and visual detail designs before generating a full storyboard. Our studies show that narrative framing introduces the necessary diversity to translate various articles into reels, and establishing foundational details helps generate scripts that are more relevant and coherent. We also discuss the benefits of using narrative framing and foundational details in content retargeting.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Next Steps for Human-Centered Generative AI: A Technical Perspective

Through iterative, cross-disciplinary discussions, we define and propose next-steps for Human-centered Generative AI (HGAI). We contribute a comprehensive research agenda that lays out future directions of Generative AI spanning three levels: aligning with human values; assimilating human intents; and augmenting human abilities. By identifying these next-steps, we intend to draw interdisciplinary research teams to pursue a coherent set of emergent ideas in HGAI, focusing on their interested topics while maintaining a coherent big picture of the future work landscape.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

CrossA11y: Identifying Video Accessibility Issues via Cross-modal Grounding

Authors make their videos visually accessible by adding audio descriptions (AD), and auditorily accessible by adding closed captions (CC). However, creating AD and CC is challenging and tedious, especially for non-professional describers and captioners, due to the difficulty of identifying accessibility problems in videos. A video author will have to watch the video through and manually check for inaccessible information frame-by-frame, for both visual and auditory modalities. In this paper, we present CrossA11y, a system that helps authors efficiently detect and address visual and auditory accessibility issues in videos. Using cross-modal grounding analysis, CrossA11y automatically measures accessibility of visual and audio segments in a video by checking for modality asymmetries. CrossA11y then displays these segments and surfaces visual and audio accessibility issues in a unified interface, making it intuitive to locate, review, script AD/CC in-place, and preview the described and captioned video immediately. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CrossA11y through a lab study with 11 participants, comparing to existing baseline.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Audio-driven Neural Gesture Reenactment with Video Motion Graphs

Human speech is often accompanied by body gestures including arm and hand gestures. We present a method that reenacts a high-quality video with gestures matching a target speech audio. The key idea of our method is to split and re-assemble clips from a reference video through a novel video motion graph encoding valid transitions between clips. To seamlessly connect different clips in the reenactment, we propose a pose-aware video blending network which synthesizes video frames around the stitched frames between two clips. Moreover, we developed an audio-based gesture searching algorithm to find the optimal order of the reenacted frames. Our system generates reenactments that are consistent with both the audio rhythms and the speech content. We evaluate our synthesized video quality quantitatively, qualitatively, and with user studies, demonstrating that our method produces videos of much higher quality and consistency with the target audio compared to previous work and baselines.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Audio-Visual Fusion Layers for Event Type Aware Video Recognition

Human brain is continuously inundated with the multisensory information and their complex interactions coming from the outside world at any given moment. Such information is automatically analyzed by binding or segregating in our brain. While this task might seem effortless for human brains, it is extremely challenging to build a machine that can perform similar tasks since complex interactions cannot be dealt with single type of integration but requires more sophisticated approaches. In this paper, we propose a new model to address the multisensory integration problem with individual event-specific layers in a multi-task learning scheme. Unlike previous works where single type of fusion is used, we design event-specific layers to deal with different audio-visual relationship tasks, enabling different ways of audio-visual formation. Experimental results show that our event-specific layers can discover unique properties of the audio-visual relationships in the videos. Moreover, although our network is formulated with single labels, it can output additional true multi-labels to represent the given videos. We demonstrate that our proposed framework also exposes the modality bias of the video data category-wise and dataset-wise manner in popular benchmark datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Can one hear the shape of a neural network?: Snooping the GPU via Magnetic Side Channel

Neural network applications have become popular in both enterprise and personal settings. Network solutions are tuned meticulously for each task, and designs that can robustly resolve queries end up in high demand. As the commercial value of accurate and performant machine learning models increases, so too does the demand to protect neural architectures as confidential investments. We explore the vulnerability of neural networks deployed as black boxes across accelerated hardware through electromagnetic side channels. We examine the magnetic flux emanating from a graphics processing unit's power cable, as acquired by a cheap $3 induction sensor, and find that this signal betrays the detailed topology and hyperparameters of a black-box neural network model. The attack acquires the magnetic signal for one query with unknown input values, but known input dimensions. The network reconstruction is possible due to the modular layer sequence in which deep neural networks are evaluated. We find that each layer component's evaluation produces an identifiable magnetic signal signature, from which layer topology, width, function type, and sequence order can be inferred using a suitably trained classifier and a joint consistency optimization based on integer programming. We study the extent to which network specifications can be recovered, and consider metrics for comparing network similarity. We demonstrate the potential accuracy of this side channel attack in recovering the details for a broad range of network architectures, including random designs. We consider applications that may exploit this novel side channel exposure, such as adversarial transfer attacks. In response, we discuss countermeasures to protect against our method and other similar snooping techniques.

cs.CR↗