Xiujie Song

Xiujie Song, Qi Jia, Shota Watanabe et al.

An image can convey a compelling story by presenting rich, logically connected visual clues. These connections form Chains-of-Reasoning (CoRs) within the image, enabling viewers to infer events, causal relationships, and other information, thereby understanding the underlying story. In this paper, we focus on these semantically rich images and define them as Storytelling Images. Such images have diverse applications beyond illustration creation and cognitive screening, leveraging their ability to convey multi-layered information visually and inspire active interpretation. However, due to their complex semantic nature, Storytelling Images are inherently challenging to create, and thus remain relatively scarce. To address this challenge, we introduce the Storytelling Image Generation task, which explores how generative AI models can be leveraged to create such images. Specifically, we propose a two-stage pipeline, StorytellingPainter, which combines the creative reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the visual synthesis capabilities of Text-to-Image (T2I) models to generate Storytelling Images. Alongside this pipeline, we develop a dedicated evaluation framework comprising three main evaluators: a Semantic Complexity Evaluator, a KNN-based Diversity Evaluator and a Story-Image Alignment Evaluator. Given the critical role of story generation in the Storytelling Image Generation task and the performance disparity between open-source and proprietary LLMs, we further explore tailored training strategies to reduce this gap, resulting in a series of lightweight yet effective models named Mini-Storytellers. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/xiujiesong/StorytellingImageGeneration.

Qi Jia, Kaiwei Zhang, Xiujie Song et al.

Understanding how well large language models can follow users' instructions throughout a dialogue spanning multiple topics is of great importance for data-intensive conversational applications. Existing benchmarks are often limited to a fixed number of turns, making them susceptible to saturation and failing to account for the user's interactive experience. In this work, we propose an extensible framework for assessing multi-turn instruction-following ability. At its core, our framework decouples linguistic surface forms from user intent simulation through a three-layer mechanism that tracks constraints, instructions, and topics. This framework mimics User-LLM interaction by enabling the dynamic construction of benchmarks with state changes and tracebacks, terminating a conversation only when the model exhausts a simulated user's patience. We define a suite of metrics capturing the quality of the interaction process. Using this framework, we construct EvolIF, an evolving instruction-following benchmark incorporating nine distinct constraint types. Our results indicate that GPT-5 exhibits superior instruction-following performance. It sustains an average of 18.54 conversational turns and demonstrates 70.31% robustness, outperforming Gemini-2.5-Pro by a significant margin of 11.41%, while other models lag far behind. All of the data and code will be made publicly available online.

Qi Jia, Haodong Zhao, Dun Pei et al.

Benchmarking AI systems in multi-turn interactive scenarios is essential for understanding their practical capabilities in real-world applications. However, existing evaluation protocols are highly heterogeneous, differing significantly in dataset formats, model interfaces, and evaluation pipelines, which severely impedes systematic comparison. In this work, we present UniDial-EvalKit (UDE), a unified evaluation toolkit for assessing interactive AI systems. The core contribution of UDE lies in its holistic unification: it standardizes heterogeneous data formats into a universal schema, streamlines complex evaluation pipelines through a modular architecture, and aligns metric calculations under a consistent scoring interface. It also supports efficient large-scale evaluation through parallel generation and scoring, as well as checkpoint-based caching to eliminate redundant computation. Validated across diverse multi-turn benchmarks, UDE not only guarantees high reproducibility through standardized workflows and transparent logging, but also significantly improves evaluation efficiency and extensibility. We make the complete toolkit and evaluation scripts publicly available to foster a standardized benchmarking ecosystem and accelerate future breakthroughs in interactive AI.

Xiujie Song, Mengyue Wu, Kenny Q. Zhu et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), despite their recent success, are hardly comprehensively tested for their cognitive abilities. Inspired by the prevalent use of the Cookie Theft task in human cognitive tests, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark to evaluate high-level cognitive abilities of LVLMs using images with rich semantics. The benchmark consists of 251 images along with comprehensive annotations. It defines eight reasoning capabilities and comprises an image description task and a visual question answering task. Our evaluation of well-known LVLMs shows that there is still a significant gap in cognitive abilities between LVLMs and humans.

Qi Jia, Xiujie Song, Zicheng Zhang et al.

Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) predominantely focus on assessing their capabilities through verifiable tasks. Such objective and static benchmarks offer limited utility for practical LLM selection, making it difficult for users to find suitable models for their individual needs. To bridge this gap, we present the first User-Centric Subjective Leaderboard (USL), which provides a preference-driven, dynamic ranking of LLMs across diverse real-world scenarios. Our work is built upon a thorough investigation of real human preference data, involving more than 10K subjective queries. Our investigation reveals significant diversity and contradictions in human preferences, which limit the effectiveness of state-of-the-art reward models. To address this, we introduce Customizable Reward Models (CRMs). With only 4B parameters, our CRM surpasses the performance of leading models such as GPT-4.1 and Gemini-2.5-pro, showing exceptional generalization capabilities across new topics and criteria. The USL, powered by CRMs, exhibits strong negative correlations to contradictory preferences.

Xiujie Song, Xiaoyi Pang, Haifeng Tang et al.

Quantifying image complexity at the entity level is straightforward, but the assessment of semantic complexity has been largely overlooked. In fact, there are differences in semantic complexity across images. Images with richer semantics can tell vivid and engaging stories and offer a wide range of application scenarios. For example, the Cookie Theft picture is such a kind of image and is widely used to assess human language and cognitive abilities due to its higher semantic complexity. Additionally, semantically rich images can benefit the development of vision models, as images with limited semantics are becoming less challenging for them. However, such images are scarce, highlighting the need for a greater number of them. For instance, there is a need for more images like Cookie Theft to cater to people from different cultural backgrounds and eras. Assessing semantic complexity requires human experts and empirical evidence. Automatic evaluation of how semantically rich an image will be the first step of mining or generating more images with rich semantics, and benefit human cognitive assessment, Artificial Intelligence, and various other applications. In response, we propose the Image Semantic Assessment (ISA) task to address this problem. We introduce the first ISA dataset and a novel method that leverages language to solve this vision problem. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.