Yao Xiao

Han Jiang, Yao Xiao, Rachel Hurley et al.

Our study examines how generative AI (GenAI) influences performance, creative self-efficacy, and cognitive load in architectural conceptual design tasks. Thirty-six student participants from Architectural Engineering and other disciplines completed a two-phase architectural design task, first independently and then with external tools (GenAI-assisted condition and control condition using an online repository of existing architectural projects). Design outcomes were evaluated by expert raters, while self-efficacy and cognitive load were self-reported after each phase. Difference-in-differences analyses revealed no overall performance advantage of GenAI across participants; however, subgroup analyses showed that GenAI significantly improved design performance for novice designers. In contrast, general creative self-efficacy declined for students using GenAI. Cognitive load did not differ significantly between conditions, though prompt usage patterns showed that iterative idea generation and visual feedback prompts were linked to greater reductions in cognitive load. These findings suggest that GenAI effectiveness depends on users' prior expertise and interaction strategies through prompting.

Jianhui Ning, Yao Xiao, Zikang Xiong

Compared with the fixed-run designs, the sequential adaptive designs (SAD) are thought to be more efficient and effective. Efficient global optimization (EGO) is one of the most popular SAD methods for expensive black-box optimization problems. A well-recognized weakness of the original EGO in complex computer experiments is that it is serial, and hence the modern parallel computing techniques cannot be utilized to speed up the running of simulator experiments. For those multiple points EGO methods, the heavy computation and points clustering are the obstacles. In this work, a novel batch SAD method, named "accelerated EGO", is forwarded by using a refined sampling/importance resampling (SIR) method to search the points with large expected improvement (EI) values. The computation burden of the new method is much lighter, and the points clustering is also avoided. The efficiency of the proposed SAD is validated by nine classic test functions with dimension from 2 to 12. The empirical results show that the proposed algorithm indeed can parallelize original EGO, and gain much improvement compared against the other parallel EGO algorithm especially under high-dimensional case. Additionally, we also apply the new method to the hyper-parameter tuning of Support Vector Machine (SVM). Accelerated EGO obtains comparable cross validation accuracy with other methods and the CPU time can be reduced a lot due to the parallel computation and sampling method.