Ting-Ying Lee

Yen-Ting Liu, Chiu-Hsuan Wang, TzuLing Chen et al.

In natural human-to-human communication, multimodal user input is typically used to supplement explicit and complement implicit voice commands, with casualness allowing for flexible input modality combinations and tolerance for imprecise input data. For example, saying "I want that." with a casual glance at a bottle of water is clear enough in human-to-human communication as an implicit voice command accompanied by gaze and/or gestures, rather than an explicit one. To enable such a human-like interaction in human-robot interaction (HRI), we propose a system, IntenBot, to understand user intentions from flexible and imprecise multimodal input, including voice, gaze, and finger-pointing, in XR. The disambiguation capability of large language models (LLMs) is used to filter out irrelevant input modalities and imprecise input data, generating potential instructions for user confirmation. The flexible and imprecise multimodal input enables casual, human-like interaction with robots, reducing time, effort, and attention, and could also be used as non-voice input. We conducted an informative user behavior study in a simulated environment to understand users' natural be- havior in flexibly interacting with a robot using multimodal input and to obtain appropriate angle range parameters for gaze and finger-pointing. An XR study was then performed to evaluate the performance of IntenBot, compared with other methods. We also deployed IntenBot on a physical robot to showcase its real-world applications.

Wen-Fan Wang, Chien-Ting Lu, Jin Ping Ng et al.

Animation pre-production lays the foundation of an animated film by transforming initial concepts into a coherent blueprint across interdependent stages such as ideation, scripting, design, and storyboarding. While generative AI tools are increasingly adopted in this process, they remain isolated, requiring creators to juggle multiple systems without integrated workflow support. Our formative study with 12 professional creative directors and independent animators revealed key challenges in their current practice: Creators must manually coordinate fragmented outputs, manage large volumes of information, and struggle to maintain continuity and creative control between stages. Based on the insights, we present AnimAgents, a human-multi-agent collaborative system that coordinates complex, multi-stage workflows through a core agent and specialized agents, supported by dedicated boards for the four major stages of pre-production. AnimAgents enables stage-aware orchestration, stage-specific output management, and element-level refinement, providing an end-to-end workflow tailored to professional practice. In a within-subjects summative study with 16 professional creators, AnimAgents significantly outperformed a strong single-agent baseline that equipped with advanced parallel image generation in coordination, consistency, information management, and overall satisfaction (p < .01). A field deployment with 4 creators further demonstrated AnimAgents' effectiveness in real-world projects.

Wen-Fan Wang, Ting-Ying Lee, Chien-Ting Lu et al.

Environment designers in the entertainment industry create imaginative 2D and 3D scenes for games, films, and television, requiring both fine-grained control of specific details and consistent global coherence. Designers have increasingly integrated generative AI into their workflows, often relying on large language models (LLMs) to expand user prompts for text-to-image generation, then iteratively refining those prompts and applying inpainting. However, our formative study with 10 designers surfaced two key challenges: (1) the lengthy LLM-generated prompts make it difficult to understand and isolate the keywords that must be revised for specific visual elements; and (2) while inpainting supports localized edits, it can struggle with global consistency and correctness. Based on these insights, we present GenTune, an approach that enhances human--AI collaboration by clarifying how AI-generated prompts map to image content. Our GenTune system lets designers select any element in a generated image, trace it back to the corresponding prompt labels, and revise those labels to guide precise yet globally consistent image refinement. In a summative study with 20 designers, GenTune significantly improved prompt--image comprehension, refinement quality, and efficiency, and overall satisfaction (all $p < .01$) compared to current practice. A follow-up field study with two studios further demonstrated its effectiveness in real-world settings.