Sitong Wang

Sitong Wang, Samia Menon, Tao Long et al.

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.

Jenny Ma, Sitong Wang, Joshua H. Kung et al.

Rules files (e.g., AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md) are the primary mechanism for human-agent alignment when developers vibe code. However, they remain passive: it is not immediately apparent when rules are being used or followed, or how to improve them. To transform rules from passive text into active controls, we introduce ZORO, an interactive interface that integrates directly with a coding agent and anchors rules to every step of the coding process. After an agent generates an initial plan, ZORO enriches the plan with rules, enforces the rules during implementation by requiring the agent prove that each rule was followed, and allows users to provide in-situ feedback when they are unsatisfied with a rule application to evolve the ruleset. A technical evaluation shows that coding agents follow rules more with ZORO than without. A user study demonstrates a change in people's behavior and cognitive strategies when rules are at the forefront of vibe coding. We discuss how making rules active in agentic systems unlocks broader opportunities for human-agent alignment in coding settings and beyond.

Sitong Wang, Samia Menon, Dingzeyu Li et al.

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.

Sitong Wang, Anh Truong, Lydia B. Chilton et al.

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.

Mina Lee, Katy Ilonka Gero, John Joon Young Chung et al. · allen-ai, deepmind

In our era of rapid technological advancement, the research landscape for writing assistants has become increasingly fragmented across various research communities. We seek to address this challenge by proposing a design space as a structured way to examine and explore the multidimensional space of intelligent and interactive writing assistants. Through a large community collaboration, we explore five aspects of writing assistants: task, user, technology, interaction, and ecosystem. Within each aspect, we define dimensions (i.e., fundamental components of an aspect) and codes (i.e., potential options for each dimension) by systematically reviewing 115 papers. Our design space aims to offer researchers and designers a practical tool to navigate, comprehend, and compare the various possibilities of writing assistants, and aid in the envisioning and design of new writing assistants.

Wenjie Yang, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in machine translation (MT). However, most advanced MT-specific LLMs heavily rely on external supervision signals during training, such as human-annotated reference data or trained reward models (RMs), which are often expensive to obtain and challenging to scale. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Simple Self-Rewarding (SSR) Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for MT that is reference-free, fully online, and relies solely on self-judging rewards. Training with SSR using 13K monolingual examples and Qwen-2.5-7B as the backbone, our model SSR-Zero-7B outperforms existing MT-specific LLMs, e.g., TowerInstruct-13B and GemmaX-28-9B, as well as larger general LLMs like Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct in English $\leftrightarrow$ Chinese translation tasks from WMT23, WMT24, and Flores200 benchmarks. Furthermore, by augmenting SSR with external supervision from COMET, our strongest model, SSR-X-Zero-7B, achieves state-of-the-art performance in English $\leftrightarrow$ Chinese translation, surpassing all existing open-source models under 72B parameters and even outperforming closed-source models, e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Our analysis highlights the effectiveness of the self-rewarding mechanism compared to the external LLM-as-a-judge approach in MT and demonstrates its complementary benefits when combined with trained RMs. Our findings provide valuable insight into the potential of self-improving RL methods. We have publicly released our code, data and models.

Tao Long, Sitong Wang, Émilie Fabre et al.

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.

Tao Long, Xuanming Zhang, Sitong Wang et al.

Agentic workflows promise efficiency, but adoption hinges on whether people actually trust systems that act on their behalf. We present DoubleAgents, an agentic planning tool that embeds transparency and control through user intervention, value-reflecting policies, rich state visualizations, and uncertainty flagging for human coordination tasks. A built-in respondent simulation generates realistic scenarios, allowing users to rehearse, refine policies, and calibrate their reliance before live use. We evaluate DoubleAgents in a two-day lab study (n=10), two deployments (n=2), and a technical evaluation. Results show that participants initially hesitated to delegate but grew more reliant as they experienced transparency, control, and adaptive learning during simulated cases. Deployment results demonstrate DoubleAgents' real-world relevance and usefulness, showing that the effort required scaled appropriately with task complexity and contextual data. We contribute trust-by-design patterns and mechanisms for proactive AI -- consistency, controllability, and explainability -- along with simulation as a safe path to build and calibrate trust over time.

Sitong Wang

Humans often rely on underlying structural patterns-schemas-to create, whether by writing stories, designing software, or composing music. Schemas help organize ideas and guide exploration, but they are often difficult to discover and apply, especially in complex or unfamiliar domains. My Ph.D. research develops a framework for human-AI schema discovery and application to support creative problem solving. I design systems that support users in sensemaking over examples to abstract schemas, and in operationalizing schemas into human-AI co-creative workflows for application. This research offers insights into how schema-guided interaction can make implicit knowledge more accessible and actionable, advancing more transparent and collaborative human-AI systems.

Xiaohan Zhang, Sitong Wang, Yushen Yan et al.

High-quality novel view synthesis for large-scale scenes presents a challenging dilemma in 3D computer vision. Existing methods typically partition large scenes into multiple regions, reconstruct a 3D representation using Gaussian splatting for each region, and eventually merge them for novel view rendering. They can accurately render specific scenes, yet they do not generalize effectively for two reasons: (1) rigid spatial partition techniques struggle with arbitrary camera trajectories, and (2) the merging of regions results in Gaussian overlap to distort texture details. To address these challenges, we propose TraGraph-GS, leveraging a trajectory graph to enable high-precision rendering for arbitrarily large-scale scenes. We present a spatial partitioning method for large-scale scenes based on graphs, which incorporates a regularization constraint to enhance the rendering of textures and distant objects, as well as a progressive rendering strategy to mitigate artifacts caused by Gaussian overlap. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance both on four aerial and four ground datasets and highlight its remarkable efficiency: our method achieves an average improvement of 1.86 dB in PSNR on aerial datasets and 1.62 dB on ground datasets compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Tao Long, Dorothy Zhang, Grace Li et al.

Communicating science and technology is essential for the public to understand and engage in a rapidly changing world. Tweetorials are an emerging phenomenon where experts explain STEM topics on social media in creative and engaging ways. However, STEM experts struggle to write an engaging "hook" in the first tweet that captures the reader's attention. We propose methods to use large language models (LLMs) to help users scaffold their process of writing a relatable hook for complex scientific topics. We demonstrate that LLMs can help writers find everyday experiences that are relatable and interesting to the public, avoid jargon, and spark curiosity. Our evaluation shows that the system reduces cognitive load and helps people write better hooks. Lastly, we discuss the importance of interactivity with LLMs to preserve the correctness, effectiveness, and authenticity of the writing.

Sitong Wang, Savvas Petridis, Taeahn Kwon et al.

Pop culture is an important aspect of communication. On social media people often post pop culture reference images that connect an event, product or other entity to a pop culture domain. Creating these images is a creative challenge that requires finding a conceptual connection between the users' topic and a pop culture domain. In cognitive theory, this task is called conceptual blending. We present a system called PopBlends that automatically suggests conceptual blends. The system explores three approaches that involve both traditional knowledge extraction methods and large language models. Our annotation study shows that all three methods provide connections with similar accuracy, but with very different characteristics. Our user study shows that people found twice as many blend suggestions as they did without the system, and with half the mental demand. We discuss the advantages of combining large language models with knowledge bases for supporting divergent and convergent thinking.