Qing Xiao

Qing Xiao, Xianzhe Fan, Felix M. Simon et al.

Recently, an increasing number of news organizations have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into their workflows, leading to a further influx of AI technologists and data workers into the news industry. This has initiated cross-functional collaborations between these professionals and journalists. Although prior research has explored the impact of AI-related roles entering the news industry, there is a lack of studies on how internal cross-functional collaboration around AI unfolds between AI professionals and journalists within the news industry. Through interviews with 17 journalists, six AI technologists, and three AI workers with cross-functional experience from leading Chinese news organizations, we investigate the practices, challenges, and opportunities for internal cross-functional collaboration around AI in news industry. We first study how these journalists and AI professionals perceive existing internal cross-collaboration strategies. We explore the challenges of cross-functional collaboration and provide recommendations for enhancing future cross-functional collaboration around AI in the news industry.

Zhaowei Wang, Ying Hao, Hao Wei et al.

Recent advancements in text-to-image diffusion models have significantly transformed visual content generation, yet their application in specialized fields such as interior design remains underexplored. In this paper, we present RoomDiffusion, a pioneering diffusion model meticulously tailored for the interior design industry. To begin with, we build from scratch a whole data pipeline to update and evaluate data for iterative model optimization. Subsequently, techniques such as multiaspect training, multi-stage fine-tune and model fusion are applied to enhance both the visual appeal and precision of the generated results. Lastly, leveraging the latent consistency Distillation method, we distill and expedite the model for optimal efficiency. Unlike existing models optimized for general scenarios, RoomDiffusion addresses specific challenges in interior design, such as lack of fashion, high furniture duplication rate, and inaccurate style. Through our holistic human evaluation protocol with more than 20 professional human evaluators, RoomDiffusion demonstrates industry-leading performance in terms of aesthetics, accuracy, and efficiency, surpassing all existing open source models such as stable diffusion and SDXL.

Yingming Zhang, Wuqi Su, Qing Xiao et al.

Existing single image dehazing methods have demonstrated satisfactory performance on homogeneous thin-haze images; however, they often struggle with non-homogeneous hazy images that exhibit spatially varying haze concentrations and abrupt density transitions across different regions. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a novel multi-branch deep neural network framework, termed Concentration Partitioning and Image Fusion Network (CPIFNet), which decomposes the challenging non-homogeneous dehazing problem into a set of tractable homogeneous sub-problems. Our key insight is that a single non-homogeneous hazy image can be viewed as a composite of multiple local regions, each exhibiting approximately homogeneous haze characteristics. CPIFNet employs a two-stage architecture consisting of an Image Enhancement Network (IENet) stage and an Image Fusion Network (IFNet) stage. In the first stage, multiple IENet branches are independently trained on homogeneous haze datasets of different concentration levels, producing enhancement models that excel at restoring regions matching their respective haze densities. In the second stage, the IFNet intelligently aggregates the advantageous regions from all enhancement outputs through deep feature stacking and merging, yielding a unified high-quality dehazed result. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive loss function incorporating reconstruction, perceptual, structural, and color losses to jointly supervise both stages.

Yingming Zhang, Wuqi Su, Qing Xiao et al.

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) plays a pivotal role in a broad spectrum of mission-critical applications, including maritime surveillance, military search and rescue, early warning systems, and precision-guided strikes, all of which demand the precise identification of dim, sub-pixel targets amid highly cluttered infrared backgrounds. Despite significant progress driven by deep learning methods, fundamental challenges persist: infrared small targets occupy extremely limited spatial extents (often only a few pixels), exhibit low signal-to-clutter ratios, and are easily confused with structurally complex backgrounds that frequently induce false alarms. Existing encoder-decoder architectures suffer from two key limitations - an information bottleneck in early convolutional stages that undermines fine-grained target perception, and static skip connections that lack the dynamic adaptability required to discriminate between genuine targets and pseudo-target regions. To address these challenges, we propose SANet, a Selective Attention-based Network built upon the classical U-Net framework and augmented with two novel components: (1) a \emph{Dual-path Semantic-aware Module} (DSM) that integrates standard convolutions for local spatial detail preservation with pinwheel-shaped convolutions for expanded, direction-sensitive receptive fields, followed by a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) for fine-grained spatial-channel feature recalibration; and (2) a \emph{Selective Attention Fusion Module} (SAFM) that replaces conventional static skip connections with a spatially adaptive, learnable weighting mechanism to perform context-aware, cross-scale feature fusion.

Rongyi Chen, Ziyan Xin, Qing Xiao et al.

The digital transformation of religious practice has reshaped how billions of people engage with spiritual content, with video-sharing platforms becoming central to contemporary religious communication. Yet HCI research lacks systematic understanding of how narrative and visual elements create meaningful spiritual experiences and foster viewer engagement. We present a mixed-methods study of religious videos on YouTube across major religions, developing taxonomies of narrative frameworks, visual elements, and viewer interaction. Using LLM-assisted analysis, we studied relationships between content characteristics and viewer responses. Religious videos predominantly adopt lecture-style formats with authority-based persuasion strategies, using salvation narratives for guidance. All prefer bright lighting, with Buddhism favoring warm tones and prominent symbols, Judaism preferring indoor settings, and Hinduism emphasizing sacred objects. We identified differentiated patterns of emotional sharing among religious viewers while revealing significant correlations between content characteristics and engagement, particularly regarding AI-generated content. We provide evidence-based guidance for creating inclusive and engaging spiritual media.

Zhiyang Wu, Junliang Chen, Qian Wan et al.

Equipping laypeople with the capabilities to seek legal information has been an important goal for Legal Empowerment in modern society. However, unlike general information-seeking behaviors, legal information seeking is characterized by high stakes, urgency, and a critical need for emotional support, which traditional text-based searching platforms struggle to satisfy. In recent years, people have been increasingly turning to Video-Sharing Platforms (VSPs) for access to legal information and to fulfill their legal needs. Despite the importance of this shift, such VSP-mediated legal information-seeking practices remain underexplored. Through an observational analysis of legal content on two VSPs (Douyin and Bilibili) and interviews with 20 Chinese information seekers, this study examined the practices and challenges associated with seeking, comprehending, and evaluating legal information on VSPs. We further revealed the formation of trust and engagement on the VSP-based legal knowledge-sharing community, highlighting how VSP affordances helped mitigate seekers' epistemic discomfort and satisfy their needs for emotional support. In the discussion, we provided insights on balancing heuristic and systematic processing to encourage information cross-validation, and offered implications for designing trustworthy civic information systems and fostering an accessible, safe, and efficient information-seeking environment in digital space.

Tianyi Chen, Michael Solodko, Sen Wang et al.

Computer Using Agents (CUAs) are increasingly equipped with external tools, enabling them to perform complex and realistic tasks. For CUAs to operate effectively, application selection, which refers to deciding which application to use before invoking fine-grained tools such as APIs, is a fundamental capability. It determines whether the agent initializes the correct environment, avoids orchestration confusion, and efficiently focuses on relevant context. However, existing benchmarks primarily assess fine-grained API selection, offering limited insight into whether models can reason across and choose between different applications. To fill this gap, we introduce AppSelectBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating application selection in CUAs. AppSelectBench contains a novel user task generation pipeline that produces realistic, diverse, and semantically grounded user intents at scale, together with unified evaluation protocols covering random, heuristic, zero-shot, few-shot, and retrieval-augmented-settings. AppSelectBench covers one hundred widely used desktop applications and includes more than one hundred thousand realistic, diverse, and semantically grounded user tasks. Extensive experiments across both closed-source and open-source large language models reveal systematic strengths and weaknesses in inter-application reasoning, showing that even the most capable models still struggle to make consistent application choices. Together, these results establish AppSelectBench as a foundation for studying and advancing application level reasoning, an essential yet underexplored capability of intelligent CUAs. The source is available at https://microsoft.github.io/appselectbench/.

Yike Shi, Qing Xiao, Qing Hu et al.

Large language models can influence users through conversation, creating new forms of dark patterns that differ from traditional UX dark patterns. We define LLM dark patterns as manipulative or deceptive behaviors enacted in dialogue. Drawing on prior work and AI incident reports, we outline a diverse set of categories with real-world examples. Using them, we conducted a scenario-based study where participants (N=34) compared manipulative and neutral LLM responses. Our results reveal that recognition of LLM dark patterns often hinged on conversational cues such as exaggerated agreement, biased framing, or privacy intrusions, but these behaviors were also sometimes normalized as ordinary assistance. Users' perceptions of these dark patterns shaped how they respond to them. Responsibilities for these behaviors were also attributed in different ways, with participants assigning it to companies and developers, the model itself, or to users. We conclude with implications for design, advocacy, and governance to safeguard user autonomy.

Zihe Ran, Xiyu Li, Qing Xiao et al.

As blind and low-vision (BLV) players engage more deeply with games, accessibility features have become essential. While some research has explored tools and strategies to enhance game accessibility, the specific experiences of these players with mobile games remain underexamined. This study addresses this gap by investigating how BLV users experience mobile games with varying accessibility levels. Through interviews with 32 experienced BLV mobile players, we explore their perceptions, challenges, and strategies for engaging with mobile games. Our findings reveal that BLV players turn to mobile games to alleviate boredom, achieve a sense of accomplishment, and build social connections, but face barriers depending on the game's accessibility level. We also compare mobile games to other forms of gaming, highlighting the relative advantages of mobile games, such as the inherent accessibility of smartphones. This study contributes to understanding BLV mobile gaming experiences and provides insights for enhancing accessible mobile game design.

Qing Xiao, Siyeop Yoon, Hui Ren et al.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative condition characterized by diverse progression rates among individuals, with changes in cortical thickness (CTh) closely linked to its progression. Accurately forecasting CTh trajectories can significantly enhance early diagnosis and intervention strategies, providing timely care. However, the longitudinal data essential for these studies often suffer from temporal sparsity and incompleteness, presenting substantial challenges in modeling the disease's progression accurately. Existing methods are limited, focusing primarily on datasets without missing entries or requiring predefined assumptions about CTh progression. To overcome these obstacles, we propose a conditional score-based diffusion model specifically designed to generate CTh trajectories with the given baseline information, such as age, sex, and initial diagnosis. Our conditional diffusion model utilizes all available data during the training phase to make predictions based solely on baseline information during inference without needing prior history about CTh progression. The prediction accuracy of the proposed CTh prediction pipeline using a conditional score-based model was compared for sub-groups consisting of cognitively normal, mild cognitive impairment, and AD subjects. The Bland-Altman analysis shows our diffusion-based prediction model has a near-zero bias with narrow 95% confidential interval compared to the ground-truth CTh in 6-36 months. In addition, our conditional diffusion model has a stochastic generative nature, therefore, we demonstrated an uncertainty analysis of patient-specific CTh prediction through multiple realizations.

Xianzhe Fan, Qing Xiao, Xuhui Zhou et al. · allen-ai, cmu

AI companions based on large language models can role-play and converse very naturally. When value conflicts arise between the AI companion and the user, it may offend or upset the user. Yet, little research has examined such conflicts. We first conducted a formative study that analyzed 151 user complaints about conflicts with AI companions, providing design implications for our study. Based on these, we created Minion, a technology probe to help users resolve human-AI value conflicts. Minion applies a user-empowerment intervention method that provides suggestions by combining expert-driven and user-driven conflict resolution strategies. We conducted a technology probe study, creating 40 value conflict scenarios on Character.AI and Talkie. 22 participants completed 274 tasks and successfully resolved conflicts 94.16% of the time. We summarize user responses, preferences, and needs in resolving value conflicts, and propose design implications to reduce conflicts and empower users to resolve them more effectively.

Pengfei Jin, Peng Shu, Sifan Song et al.

Recent advances in parameter-efficient transfer learning have demonstrated the utility of composing LoRA adapters from libraries of pretrained modules. However, most existing approaches rely on simple retrieval heuristics or uniform averaging, which overlook the latent structure of task relationships in representation space. We propose a new framework for adapter reuse that moves beyond retrieval, formulating adapter composition as a geometry-aware sparse reconstruction problem. Specifically, we represent each task by a latent prototype vector derived from the base model's encoder and aim to approximate the target task prototype as a sparse linear combination of retrieved reference prototypes, under an $\ell_1$-regularized optimization objective. The resulting combination weights are then used to blend the corresponding LoRA adapters, yielding a composite adapter tailored to the target task. This formulation not only preserves the local geometric structure of the task representation manifold, but also promotes interpretability and efficient reuse by selecting a minimal set of relevant adapters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple domains-including medical image segmentation, medical report generation and image synthesis. Our results highlight the benefit of coupling retrieval with latent geometry-aware optimization for improved zero-shot generalization.

Ruiwei Xiao, Qing Xiao, Xinying Hou et al.

Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly entering K-12 classrooms, offering teachers new ways for teaching practices. Yet GenAI models are often trained on culturally uneven datasets, embedding a "default culture" that often misaligns with local classrooms. To understand how teachers navigate this gap, we defined the new concept Cultural Distance (the gap between GenAI's default cultural repertoire and the situated demands of teaching practice) and conducted in-depth interviews with 30 K-12 teachers, 10 each from South Africa, Taiwan, and the United States, who had integrated AI into their teaching practice. These teachers' experiences informed the development of our three-level cultural distance framework. This work contributes the concept and framework of cultural distance, six illustrative instances spanning in low, mid, high distance levels with teachers' experiences and strategies for addressing them. Empirically, we offer implications to help AI designers, policymakers, and educators create more equitable and culturally responsive GenAI tools for education.

Qing Xiao, Yingshan Peng, PeiPei Zhang

Dysarthric speech recognition faces challenges from severity variations and disparities relative to normal speech. Conventional approaches individually fine-tune ASR models pre-trained on normal speech per patient to prevent feature conflicts. Counter-intuitively, experiments reveal that multi-speaker fine-tuning (simultaneously on multiple dysarthric speakers) improves recognition of individual speech patterns. This strategy enhances generalization via broader pathological feature learning, mitigates speaker-specific overfitting, reduces per-patient data dependence, and improves target-speaker accuracy - achieving up to 13.15% lower WER versus single-speaker fine-tuning.

Hong Liu, Zhaobiao Lv, Zhijian Ou et al.

Energy-based language models (ELMs) parameterize an unnormalized distribution for natural sentences and are radically different from popular autoregressive language models (ALMs). As an important application, ELMs have been successfully used as a means for calculating sentence scores in speech recognition, but they all use less-modern CNN or LSTM networks. The recent progress in Transformer networks and large pretrained models such as BERT and GPT2 opens new possibility to further advancing ELMs. In this paper, we explore different architectures of energy functions and different training methods to investigate the capabilities of ELMs in rescoring for speech recognition, all using large pretrained models as backbones.

Yu Feng, Qing Xiao, Claus Brenner et al.

With increasing urbanization, flooding is a major challenge for many cities today. Based on forecast precipitation, topography, and pipe networks, flood simulations can provide early warnings for areas and buildings at risk of flooding. Basement windows, doors, and underground garage entrances are common places where floodwater can flow into a building. Some buildings have been prepared or designed considering the threat of flooding, but others have not. Therefore, knowing the heights of these facade openings helps to identify places that are more susceptible to water ingress. However, such data is not yet readily available in most cities. Traditional surveying of the desired targets may be used, but this is a very time-consuming and laborious process. This research presents a new process for the extraction of windows and doors from LiDAR mobile mapping data. Deep learning object detection models are trained to identify these objects. Usually, this requires to provide large amounts of manual annotations. In this paper, we mitigate this problem by leveraging a rule-based method. In a first step, the rule-based method is used to generate pseudo-labels. A semi-supervised learning strategy is then applied with three different levels of supervision. The results show that using only automatically generated pseudo-labels, the learning-based model outperforms the rule-based approach by 14.6% in terms of F1-score. After five hours of human supervision, it is possible to improve the model by another 6.2%. By comparing the detected facade openings' heights with the predicted water levels from a flood simulation model, a map can be produced which assigns per-building flood risk levels. This information can be combined with flood forecasting to provide a more targeted disaster prevention guide for the city's infrastructure and residential buildings.