arXiv subjects

Zeng

Publications and source records attributed to Zeng.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

The 1st International Workshop on Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Generation (DRL4Real): Methods and Results

This paper reviews the 1st International Workshop on Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Generation (DRL4Real), held in conjunction with ICCV 2025. The workshop aimed to bridge the gap between the theoretical promise of Disentangled Representation Learning (DRL) and its application in realistic scenarios, moving beyond synthetic benchmarks. DRL4Real focused on evaluating DRL methods in practical applications such as controllable generation, exploring advancements in model robustness, interpretability, and generalization. The workshop accepted 9 papers covering a broad range of topics, including the integration of novel inductive biases (e.g., language), the application of diffusion models to DRL, 3D-aware disentanglement, and the expansion of DRL into specialized domains like autonomous driving and EEG analysis. This summary details the workshop's objectives, the themes of the accepted papers, and provides an overview of the methodologies proposed by the authors.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Objectifying the Subjective: Cognitive Biases in Topic Interpretations

Interpretation of topics is crucial for their downstream applications. State-of-the-art evaluation measures of topic quality such as coherence and word intrusion do not measure how much a topic facilitates the exploration of a corpus. To design evaluation measures grounded on a task, and a population of users, we do user studies to understand how users interpret topics. We propose constructs of topic quality and ask users to assess them in the context of a topic and provide rationale behind evaluations. We use reflexive thematic analysis to identify themes of topic interpretations from rationales. Users interpret topics based on availability and representativeness heuristics rather than probability. We propose a theory of topic interpretation based on the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic: users anchor on salient words and make semantic adjustments to arrive at an interpretation. Topic interpretation can be viewed as making a judgment under uncertainty by an ecologically rational user, and hence cognitive biases aware user models and evaluation frameworks are needed.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Exploring Polarization of Users Behavior on Twitter During the 2019 South American Protests

Research across different disciplines has documented the expanding polarization in social media. However, much of it focused on the US political system or its culturally controversial topics. In this work, we explore polarization on Twitter in a different context, namely the protest that paralyzed several countries in the South American region in 2019. By leveraging users' endorsement of politicians' tweets and hashtag campaigns with defined stances towards the protest (for or against), we construct a weakly labeled stance dataset with millions of users. We explore polarization in two related dimensions: language and news consumption patterns. In terms of linguistic polarization, we apply recent insights that leveraged machine translation methods, showing that the two communities speak consistently "different" languages, mainly along ideological lines (e.g., fascist translates to communist). Our results indicate that this recently-proposed methodology is also informative in different languages and contexts than originally applied. In terms of news consumption patterns, we cluster news agencies based on homogeneity of their user bases and quantify the observed polarization in its consumption. We find empirical evidence of the "filter bubble" phenomenon during the event, as we not only show that the user bases are homogeneous in terms of stance, but the probability that a user transitions from media of different clusters is low.

cs.SI↗