Ziqing Qian

Ziqing Qian, Jiaying Lei, Shengqi Dang et al.

Social media has fundamentally transformed how people access information and form social connections, with content expression playing a critical role in driving information diffusion. While prior research has focused largely on network structures and tipping point identification, it provides limited tools for automatically generating content tailored for virality within a specific audience. To fill this gap, we propose the novel task of DOCG and introduce an information enhancement algorithm for generating content optimized for diffusion. Our method includes an influence indicator that enables content-level diffusion assessment without requiring access to network topology, and an information editor that employs reinforcement learning to explore interpretable editing strategies. The editor leverages generative models to produce semantically faithful, audience-aware textual or visual content. Experiments on real-world social media datasets and user study demonstrate that our approach significantly improves diffusion effectiveness while preserving the core semantics of the original content.

Shengqi Dang, Jiaying Lei, Yi He et al.

Beyond conveying semantic information, an image can also manifest cognitive attributes that elicit specific cognitive processes from the viewer, such as memory encoding or emotional response. While modern text-to-image models excel at generating semantically coherent content, they remain limited in their ability to control such cognitive properties of images (e.g., valence, memorability), often failing to align with the specific psychological intent. To bridge this gap, we introduce CogBlender, a framework that enables continuous and multi-dimensional intervention of cognitive properties during text-to-image generation. Our approach is built upon a mapping between the Cognitive Space, representing the space of cognitive properties, and the Semantic Manifold, representing the manifold of the visual semantics. We define a set of Cognitive Anchors, serving as the boundary points for the cognitive space. Then we reformulate the velocity field within the flow-matching process by interpolating from the velocity field of different anchors. Consequently, the generative process is driven by the velocity field and dynamically steered by multi-dimensional cognitive scores, enabling precise, fine-grained, and continuous intervention. We validate the effectiveness of CogBlender across four representative cognitive dimensions: valence, arousal, dominance, and image memorability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves effective cognitive intervention. Our work provides an effective paradigm for cognition-driven creative design.

Shengqi Dang, Yi He, Long Ling et al.

Recent research shows that emotions can enhance users' cognition and influence information communication. While research on visual emotion analysis is extensive, limited work has been done on helping users generate emotionally rich image content. Existing work on emotional image generation relies on discrete emotion categories, making it challenging to capture complex and subtle emotional nuances accurately. Additionally, these methods struggle to control the specific content of generated images based on text prompts. In this work, we introduce the new task of continuous emotional image content generation (C-EICG) and present EmotiCrafter, an emotional image generation model that generates images based on text prompts and Valence-Arousal values. Specifically, we propose a novel emotion-embedding mapping network that embeds Valence-Arousal values into textual features, enabling the capture of specific emotions in alignment with intended input prompts. Additionally, we introduce a loss function to enhance emotion expression. The experimental results show that our method effectively generates images representing specific emotions with the desired content and outperforms existing techniques.