arXiv subjects

Mayu Otani

Publications and source records attributed to Mayu Otani.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MEDit-Bench: A Dataset for Evaluating Message-Driven Narrative Video Editing

Video editing is fundamentally message-driven: even from the same source footage, the selected shots change depending on the narrative the editor wishes to convey. Benchmarks for a closely related task, video summarization, reduce editorial intent to a single, message-agnostic notion of saliency and thus do not account for this diversity. For evaluating message-driven video editing, we present \textbf{MEDit-Bench}, a dataset and benchmark, which pairs long-form videos with multiple editing messages and multiple professionally produced edits per message, demonstrating that different messages yield substantially different edits from the same source. We define an automatic evaluation protocol based on temporal alignment metrics, and find that an LLM-as-a-judge preference, a natural proxy for narrative quality, is unreliable for this task due to severe position bias. We additionally annotate each message with ambiguity and contextfulness scores, and show that both dimensions negatively correlate with model performance, establishing message difficulty as a meaningful stratification factor. Experiments with state-of-the-art MLLMs and reinforcement fine-tuned baselines show that while strong models approach human temporal alignment at lenient thresholds, all models fall behind humans at stricter criteria. A human perceptual study further confirms a large quality gap, with professional human edits remaining consistently preferred over model outputs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DiverXplorer: Stock Image Exploration via Diversity Adjustment for Graphic Design

Graphic designers explore large stock image collections during open-ended or early-stage design tasks, yet common tools emphasize relevance and similarity, limiting designers' ability to overview the design space or discover visual patterns. We present an image exploration prototype that enables stepwise adjustment of diversity, allowing users to transition from diverse overviews to increasingly focused subsets during exploration. Our approach implements diversity control via determinantal point process (DPP)-based sampling and exposes diversity-similarity tradeoffs through interaction rather than static ranking. We report findings from a pilot study with professional graphic designers comparing our technique to baselines inspired by current tools in open-ended image selection tasks. Results suggest that stepwise diversity control supports early-stage sensemaking and comparison of visual patterns, while revealing important tradeoffs: diversity aids discovery and reduces backtracking, but becomes less desirable as exploration progresses. We aim to provide a novel perspective on how to implement transitions between diversity and similarity. Our code is available at https://github.com/CyberAgentAILab/DiverXplorer.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Evaluating Cross-Modal Reasoning Ability and Problem Characteristics with Multimodal Item Response Theory

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently emerged as general architectures capable of reasoning over diverse modalities. Benchmarks for MLLMs should measure their ability for cross-modal integration. However, current benchmarks are filled with shortcut questions, which can be solved using only a single modality, thereby yielding unreliable rankings. For example, in vision-language cases, we can find the correct answer without either the image or the text. These low-quality questions unnecessarily increase the size and computational requirements of benchmarks. We introduce a multi-modal and multidimensional item response theory framework (M3IRT) that extends classical IRT by decomposing both model ability and item difficulty into image-only, text-only, and cross-modal components. M3IRT estimates cross-modal ability of MLLMs and each question's cross-modal difficulty, enabling compact, high-quality subsets that better reflect multimodal reasoning. Across 24 VLMs on three benchmarks, M3IRT prioritizes genuinely cross-modal questions over shortcuts and preserves ranking fidelity even when 50% of items are artificially generated low-quality questions, thereby reducing evaluation cost while improving reliability. M3IRT thus offers a practical tool for assessing cross-modal reasoning and refining multimodal benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Measure Twice, Cut Once: A Semantic-Oriented Approach to Video Temporal Localization with Video LLMs

Temporally localizing user-queried events through natural language is a crucial capability for video models. Recent methods predominantly adapt video LLMs to generate event boundary timestamps for temporal localization tasks, which struggle to leverage LLMs' pre-trained semantic understanding capabilities due to the uninformative nature of timestamp outputs. In this work, we explore a timestamp-free, semantic-oriented framework that fine-tunes video LLMs using two generative learning tasks and one discriminative learning task. We first introduce a structural token generation task that enables the video LLM to recognize the temporal structure of input videos based on the input query. Through this task, the video LLM generates a sequence of special tokens, called structural tokens, which partition the video into consecutive segments and categorize them as either target events or background transitions. To enhance precise recognition of event segments, we further propose a query-focused captioning task that enables the video LLM to extract fine-grained event semantics that can be effectively utilized by the structural tokens. Finally, we introduce a structural token grounding module driven by contrastive learning to associate each structural token with its corresponding video segment, achieving holistic temporal segmentation of the input video and readily yielding the target event segments for localization. Extensive experiments across diverse temporal localization tasks demonstrate that our proposed framework, MeCo, consistently outperforms methods relying on boundary timestamp generation, highlighting the potential of a semantic-driven approach for temporal localization with video LLMs \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/pangzss/MeCo.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Multimodal Markup Document Models for Graphic Design Completion

We introduce MarkupDM, a multimodal markup document model that represents graphic design as an interleaved multimodal document consisting of both markup language and images. Unlike existing holistic approaches that rely on an element-by-attribute grid representation, our representation accommodates variable-length elements, type-dependent attributes, and text content. Inspired by fill-in-the-middle training in code generation, we train the model to complete the missing part of a design document from its surrounding context, allowing it to treat various design tasks in a unified manner. Our model also supports image generation by predicting discrete image tokens through a specialized tokenizer with support for image transparency. We evaluate MarkupDM on three tasks, attribute value, image, and text completion, and demonstrate that it can produce plausible designs consistent with the given context. To further illustrate the flexibility of our approach, we evaluate our approach on a new instruction-guided design completion task where our instruction-tuned MarkupDM compares favorably to state-of-the-art image editing models, especially in textual completion. These findings suggest that multimodal language models with our document representation can serve as a versatile foundation for broad design automation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Harnessing the Latent Diffusion Model for Training-Free Image Style Transfer

Diffusion models have recently shown the ability to generate high-quality images. However, controlling its generation process still poses challenges. The image style transfer task is one of those challenges that transfers the visual attributes of a style image to another content image. Typical obstacle of this task is the requirement of additional training of a pre-trained model. We propose a training-free style transfer algorithm, Style Tracking Reverse Diffusion Process (STRDP) for a pretrained Latent Diffusion Model (LDM). Our algorithm employs Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) function in a distinct manner during the reverse diffusion process of an LDM while tracking the encoding history of the style image. This algorithm enables style transfer in the latent space of LDM for reduced computational cost, and provides compatibility for various LDM models. Through a series of experiments and a user study, we show that our method can quickly transfer the style of an image without additional training. The speed, compatibility, and training-free aspect of our algorithm facilitates agile experiments with combinations of styles and LDMs for extensive application.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

LTSim: Layout Transportation-based Similarity Measure for Evaluating Layout Generation

We introduce a layout similarity measure designed to evaluate the results of layout generation. While several similarity measures have been proposed in prior research, there has been a lack of comprehensive discussion about their behaviors. Our research uncovers that the majority of these measures are unable to handle various layout differences, primarily due to their dependencies on strict element matching, that is one-by-one matching of elements within the same category. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new similarity measure based on optimal transport, which facilitates a more flexible matching of elements. This approach allows us to quantify the similarity between any two layouts even those sharing no element categories, making our measure highly applicable to a wide range of layout generation tasks. For tasks such as unconditional layout generation, where FID is commonly used, we also extend our measure to deal with collection-level similarities between groups of layouts. The empirical result suggests that our collection-level measure offers more reliable comparisons than existing ones like FID and Max.IoU.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

LayoutFlow: Flow Matching for Layout Generation

Finding a suitable layout represents a crucial task for diverse applications in graphic design. Motivated by simpler and smoother sampling trajectories, we explore the use of Flow Matching as an alternative to current diffusion-based layout generation models. Specifically, we propose LayoutFlow, an efficient flow-based model capable of generating high-quality layouts. Instead of progressively denoising the elements of a noisy layout, our method learns to gradually move, or flow, the elements of an initial sample until it reaches its final prediction. In addition, we employ a conditioning scheme that allows us to handle various generation tasks with varying degrees of conditioning with a single model. Empirically, LayoutFlow performs on par with state-of-the-art models while being significantly faster.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Would Deep Generative Models Amplify Bias in Future Models?

We investigate the impact of deep generative models on potential social biases in upcoming computer vision models. As the internet witnesses an increasing influx of AI-generated images, concerns arise regarding inherent biases that may accompany them, potentially leading to the dissemination of harmful content. This paper explores whether a detrimental feedback loop, resulting in bias amplification, would occur if generated images were used as the training data for future models. We conduct simulations by progressively substituting original images in COCO and CC3M datasets with images generated through Stable Diffusion. The modified datasets are used to train OpenCLIP and image captioning models, which we evaluate in terms of quality and bias. Contrary to expectations, our findings indicate that introducing generated images during training does not uniformly amplify bias. Instead, instances of bias mitigation across specific tasks are observed. We further explore the factors that may influence these phenomena, such as artifacts in image generation (e.g., blurry faces) or pre-existing biases in the original datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Multimodal Color Recommendation in Vector Graphic Documents

Color selection plays a critical role in graphic document design and requires sufficient consideration of various contexts. However, recommending appropriate colors which harmonize with the other colors and textual contexts in documents is a challenging task, even for experienced designers. In this study, we propose a multimodal masked color model that integrates both color and textual contexts to provide text-aware color recommendation for graphic documents. Our proposed model comprises self-attention networks to capture the relationships between colors in multiple palettes, and cross-attention networks that incorporate both color and CLIP-based text representations. Our proposed method primarily focuses on color palette completion, which recommends colors based on the given colors and text. Additionally, it is applicable for another color recommendation task, full palette generation, which generates a complete color palette corresponding to the given text. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses previous color palette completion methods on accuracy, color distribution, and user experience, as well as full palette generation methods concerning color diversity and similarity to the ground truth palettes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Toward Verifiable and Reproducible Human Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation

Human evaluation is critical for validating the performance of text-to-image generative models, as this highly cognitive process requires deep comprehension of text and images. However, our survey of 37 recent papers reveals that many works rely solely on automatic measures (e.g., FID) or perform poorly described human evaluations that are not reliable or repeatable. This paper proposes a standardized and well-defined human evaluation protocol to facilitate verifiable and reproducible human evaluation in future works. In our pilot data collection, we experimentally show that the current automatic measures are incompatible with human perception in evaluating the performance of the text-to-image generation results. Furthermore, we provide insights for designing human evaluation experiments reliably and conclusively. Finally, we make several resources publicly available to the community to facilitate easy and fast implementations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Towards Flexible Multi-modal Document Models

Creative workflows for generating graphical documents involve complex inter-related tasks, such as aligning elements, choosing appropriate fonts, or employing aesthetically harmonious colors. In this work, we attempt at building a holistic model that can jointly solve many different design tasks. Our model, which we denote by FlexDM, treats vector graphic documents as a set of multi-modal elements, and learns to predict masked fields such as element type, position, styling attributes, image, or text, using a unified architecture. Through the use of explicit multi-task learning and in-domain pre-training, our model can better capture the multi-modal relationships among the different document fields. Experimental results corroborate that our single FlexDM is able to successfully solve a multitude of different design tasks, while achieving performance that is competitive with task-specific and costly baselines.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

LayoutDM: Discrete Diffusion Model for Controllable Layout Generation

Controllable layout generation aims at synthesizing plausible arrangement of element bounding boxes with optional constraints, such as type or position of a specific element. In this work, we try to solve a broad range of layout generation tasks in a single model that is based on discrete state-space diffusion models. Our model, named LayoutDM, naturally handles the structured layout data in the discrete representation and learns to progressively infer a noiseless layout from the initial input, where we model the layout corruption process by modality-wise discrete diffusion. For conditional generation, we propose to inject layout constraints in the form of masking or logit adjustment during inference. We show in the experiments that our LayoutDM successfully generates high-quality layouts and outperforms both task-specific and task-agnostic baselines on several layout tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Generative Colorization of Structured Mobile Web Pages

Color is a critical design factor for web pages, affecting important factors such as viewer emotions and the overall trust and satisfaction of a website. Effective coloring requires design knowledge and expertise, but if this process could be automated through data-driven modeling, efficient exploration and alternative workflows would be possible. However, this direction remains underexplored due to the lack of a formalization of the web page colorization problem, datasets, and evaluation protocols. In this work, we propose a new dataset consisting of e-commerce mobile web pages in a tractable format, which are created by simplifying the pages and extracting canonical color styles with a common web browser. The web page colorization problem is then formalized as a task of estimating plausible color styles for a given web page content with a given hierarchical structure of the elements. We present several Transformer-based methods that are adapted to this task by prepending structural message passing to capture hierarchical relationships between elements. Experimental results, including a quantitative evaluation designed for this task, demonstrate the advantages of our methods over statistical and image colorization methods. The code is available at https://github.com/CyberAgentAILab/webcolor.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Contrastive Losses Are Natural Criteria for Unsupervised Video Summarization

Video summarization aims to select the most informative subset of frames in a video to facilitate efficient video browsing. Unsupervised methods usually rely on heuristic training objectives such as diversity and representativeness. However, such methods need to bootstrap the online-generated summaries to compute the objectives for importance score regression. We consider such a pipeline inefficient and seek to directly quantify the frame-level importance with the help of contrastive losses in the representation learning literature. Leveraging the contrastive losses, we propose three metrics featuring a desirable key frame: local dissimilarity, global consistency, and uniqueness. With features pre-trained on the image classification task, the metrics can already yield high-quality importance scores, demonstrating competitive or better performance than past heavily-trained methods. We show that by refining the pre-trained features with a lightweight contrastively learned projection module, the frame-level importance scores can be further improved, and the model can also leverage a large number of random videos and generalize to test videos with decent performance. Code available at https://github.com/pangzss/pytorch-CTVSUM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Video Summarization Overview

With the broad growth of video capturing devices and applications on the web, it is more demanding to provide desired video content for users efficiently. Video summarization facilitates quickly grasping video content by creating a compact summary of videos. Much effort has been devoted to automatic video summarization, and various problem settings and approaches have been proposed. Our goal is to provide an overview of this field. This survey covers early studies as well as recent approaches which take advantage of deep learning techniques. We describe video summarization approaches and their underlying concepts. We also discuss benchmarks and evaluations. We overview how prior work addressed evaluation and detail the pros and cons of the evaluation protocols. Last but not least, we discuss open challenges in this field.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Color Recommendation for Vector Graphic Documents based on Multi-Palette Representation

Vector graphic documents present multiple visual elements, such as images, shapes, and texts. Choosing appropriate colors for multiple visual elements is a difficult but crucial task for both amateurs and professional designers. Instead of creating a single color palette for all elements, we extract multiple color palettes from each visual element in a graphic document, and then combine them into a color sequence. We propose a masked color model for color sequence completion and recommend the specified colors based on color context in multi-palette with high probability. We train the model and build a color recommendation system on a large-scale dataset of vector graphic documents. The proposed color recommendation method outperformed other state-of-the-art methods by both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on color prediction and our color recommendation system received positive feedback from professional designers in an interview study.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Learning More May Not Be Better: Knowledge Transferability in Vision and Language Tasks

Is more data always better to train vision-and-language models? We study knowledge transferability in multi-modal tasks. The current tendency in machine learning is to assume that by joining multiple datasets from different tasks their overall performance will improve. However, we show that not all the knowledge transfers well or has a positive impact on related tasks, even when they share a common goal. We conduct an exhaustive analysis based on hundreds of cross-experiments on 12 vision-and-language tasks categorized in 4 groups. Whereas tasks in the same group are prone to improve each other, results show that this is not always the case. Other factors such as dataset size or pre-training stage have also a great impact on how well the knowledge is transferred.

cs.CV↗