Jiaju Ma

Jiaju Ma, Anyi Rao, Li-Yi Wei et al. · mit

Musicians and fans often produce lyric videos, a form of music videos that showcase the song's lyrics, for their favorite songs. However, making such videos can be challenging and time-consuming as the lyrics need to be added in synchrony and visual harmony with the video. Informed by prior work and close examination of existing lyric videos, we propose a set of design guidelines to help creators make such videos. Our guidelines ensure the readability of the lyric text while maintaining a unified focus of attention. We instantiate these guidelines in a fully automated pipeline that converts an input music video into a lyric video. We demonstrate the robustness of our pipeline by generating lyric videos from a diverse range of input sources. A user study shows that lyric videos generated by our pipeline are effective in maintaining text readability and unifying the focus of attention.

Catherine Liu, Tao Long, Asya Vaisberg et al.

Creativity support tools (CSTs) aim to elevate the quality of artists' creative processes and artifacts. Yet most current CST evaluations overlook temporal and social aspects of tool use. To address this gap, we present a longitudinal, group-based CST evaluation through a three-week deployment of ArtKrit, a computational drawing tool that supports disciplined drawing. Nine digital artists, organized into three communities of practice, completed weekly "master studies" alongside a researcher-artist. Our results show users' evolving relationships with ArtKrit over time - from early experimentation to selective incorporation or misuse - alongside changes in their ways of artistic seeing. These changes unfolded within artist support networks that fostered confidence and creative safety, and validated individual expression. Overall, our findings suggest that CST evaluations can - and should - be designed as opportunities for meaningful artistic engagement rather than purely extractive measurement exercises. We contribute this longitudinal, group-based approach as one CST evaluation method.

Jiahao Nick Li, Zhuohao Jerry Zhang, Jiaju Ma

People often capture memories through photos, screenshots, and videos. While existing AI-based tools enable querying this data using natural language, they only support retrieving individual pieces of information like certain objects in photos, and struggle with answering more complex queries that involve interpreting interconnected memories like sequential events. We conducted a one-month diary study to collect realistic user queries and generated a taxonomy of necessary contextual information for integrating with captured memories. We then introduce OmniQuery, a novel system that is able to answer complex personal memory-related questions that require extracting and inferring contextual information. OmniQuery augments individual captured memories through integrating scattered contextual information from multiple interconnected memories. Given a question, OmniQuery retrieves relevant augmented memories and uses a large language model (LLM) to generate answers with references. In human evaluations, we show the effectiveness of OmniQuery with an accuracy of 71.5%, outperforming a conventional RAG system by winning or tying for 74.5% of the time.

Jiaju Ma, Maneesh Agrawala

While large vision-language models can generate motion graphics animations from text prompts, they regularly fail to include all spatio-temporal properties described in the prompt. We introduce MoVer, a motion verification DSL based on first-order logic that can check spatio-temporal properties of a motion graphics animation. We identify a general set of such properties that people commonly use to describe animations (e.g., the direction and timing of motions, the relative positioning of objects, etc.). We implement these properties as predicates in MoVer and provide an execution engine that can apply a MoVer program to any input SVG-based motion graphics animation. We then demonstrate how MoVer can be used in an LLM-based synthesis and verification pipeline for iteratively refining motion graphics animations. Given a text prompt, our pipeline synthesizes a motion graphics animation and a corresponding MoVer program. Executing the verification program on the animation yields a report of the predicates that failed and the report can be automatically fed back to LLM to iteratively correct the animation. To evaluate our pipeline, we build a synthetic dataset of 5600 text prompts paired with ground truth MoVer verification programs. We find that while our LLM-based pipeline is able to automatically generate a correct motion graphics animation for 58.8% of the test prompts without any iteration, this number raises to 93.6% with up to 50 correction iterations. Our code and dataset are at https://mover-dsl.github.io.