Yi‐Chun Chen

Yi-Chun Chen

We present a hierarchical knowledge graph framework for the structured semantic understanding of visual narratives, using comics as a representative domain for multimodal storytelling. The framework organizes narrative content across three levels-panel, event, and macro-event, by integrating symbolic graphs that encode semantic, spatial, and temporal relationships. At the panel level, it models visual elements such as characters, objects, and actions alongside textual components including dialogue and narration. These are systematically connected to higher-level graphs that capture narrative sequences and abstract story structures. Applied to a manually annotated subset of the Manga109 dataset, the framework supports interpretable symbolic reasoning across four representative tasks: action retrieval, dialogue tracing, character appearance mapping, and timeline reconstruction. Rather than prioritizing predictive performance, the system emphasizes transparency in narrative modeling and enables structured inference aligned with cognitive theories of event segmentation and visual storytelling. This work contributes to explainable narrative analysis and offers a foundation for authoring tools, narrative comprehension systems, and interactive media applications.

Yi-Chun Chen

Understanding visual narratives such as comics requires structured representations that capture events, characters, and their relations across multiple levels of story organization. However, symbolic narrative graphs often suffer from inconsistency and redundancy, where similar actions or events are labeled differently across annotations or contexts. Such variance limits the effectiveness of reasoning and generalization. This paper introduces a semantic normalization framework for hierarchical narrative knowledge graphs. Building on cognitively grounded models of narrative comprehension, we propose methods that consolidate semantically related actions and events using lexical similarity and embedding-based clustering. The normalization process reduces annotation noise, aligns symbolic categories across narrative levels, and preserves interpretability. We demonstrate the framework on annotated manga stories from the Manga109 dataset, applying normalization to panel-, event-, and story-level graphs. Preliminary evaluations across narrative reasoning tasks, such as action retrieval, character grounding, and event summarization, show that semantic normalization improves coherence and robustness, while maintaining symbolic transparency. These findings suggest that normalization is a key step toward scalable, cognitively inspired graph models for multimodal narrative understanding.

Yi-Chun Chen, Arnav Jhala

GameTileNet is a dataset designed to provide semantic labels for low-resolution digital game art, advancing procedural content generation (PCG) and related AI research as a vision-language alignment task. Large Language Models (LLMs) and image-generative AI models have enabled indie developers to create visual assets, such as sprites, for game interactions. However, generating visuals that align with game narratives remains challenging due to inconsistent AI outputs, requiring manual adjustments by human artists. The diversity of visual representations in automatically generated game content is also limited because of the imbalance in distributions across styles for training data. GameTileNet addresses this by collecting artist-created game tiles from OpenGameArt.org under Creative Commons licenses and providing semantic annotations to support narrative-driven content generation. The dataset introduces a pipeline for object detection in low-resolution tile-based game art (e.g., 32x32 pixels) and annotates semantics, connectivity, and object classifications. GameTileNet is a valuable resource for improving PCG methods, supporting narrative-rich game content, and establishing a baseline for object detection in low-resolution, non-photorealistic images. TL;DR: GameTileNet is a semantic dataset of low-resolution game tiles designed to support narrative-driven procedural content generation through visual-language alignment.

Yi-Chun Chen, Arnav Jhala

Recent advances in large language models(LLMs) enable compelling story generation, but connecting narrative text to playable visual environments remains an open challenge in procedural content generation(PCG). We present a lightweight pipeline that transforms short narrative prompts into a sequence of 2D tile-based game scenes, reflecting the temporal structure of stories. Given an LLM-generated narrative, our system identifies three key time frames, extracts spatial predicates in the form of "Object-Relation-Object" triples, and retrieves visual assets using affordance-aware semantic embeddings from the GameTileNet dataset. A layered terrain is generated using Cellular Automata, and objects are placed using spatial rules grounded in the predicate structure. We evaluated our system in ten diverse stories, analyzing tile-object matching, affordance-layer alignment, and spatial constraint satisfaction across frames. This prototype offers a scalable approach to narrative-driven scene generation and lays the foundation for future work on multi-frame continuity, symbolic tracking, and multi-agent coordination in story-centered PCG.

Yi-Chun Chen, Arnav Jhala

We investigate the challenges of style transfer in multi-modal visual narratives. Among static visual narratives such as comics and manga, there are distinct visual styles in terms of presentation. They include style features across multiple dimensions, such as panel layout, size, shape, and color. They include both visual and text media elements. The layout of both text and media elements is also significant in terms of narrative communication. The sequential transitions between panels are where readers make inferences about the narrative world. These feature differences provide an interesting challenge for style transfer in which there are distinctions between the processing of features for each modality. We introduce the notion of comprehension-preserving style transfer (CPST) in such multi-modal domains. CPST requires not only traditional metrics of style transfer but also metrics of narrative comprehension. To spur further research in this area, we present an annotated dataset of comics and manga and an initial set of algorithms that utilize separate style transfer modules for the visual, textual, and layout parameters. To test whether the style transfer preserves narrative semantics, we evaluate this algorithm through visual story cloze tests inspired by work in computational cognition of narrative systems. Understanding the connection between style and narrative semantics provides insight for applications ranging from informational brochure designs to data storytelling.

Ziheng Lin, Yanxiong Li, Zhangjin Huang et al.

Recent efforts have been made on domestic activities classification from audio recordings, especially the works submitted to the challenge of DCASE (Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events) since 2018. In contrast, few studies were done on domestic activities clustering, which is a newly emerging problem. Domestic activities clustering from audio recordings aims at merging audio clips which belong to the same class of domestic activity into a single cluster. Domestic activities clustering is an effective way for unsupervised estimation of daily activities performed in home environment. In this study, we propose a method for domestic activities clustering using a convolutional capsule autoencoder network (CCAN). In the method, the deep embeddings are learned by the autoencoder in the CCAN, while the deep embeddings which belong to the same class of domestic activities are merged into a single cluster by a clustering layer in the CCAN. Evaluated on a public dataset adopted in DCASE-2018 Task 5, the results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of the metrics of clustering accuracy and normalized mutual information.

Yi-Chun Chen, Velibor V. Mišić

Customer behavior is often assumed to follow weak rationality, which implies that adding a product to an assortment will not increase the choice probability of another product in that assortment. However, an increasing amount of research has revealed that customers are not necessarily rational when making decisions. In this paper, we propose a new nonparametric choice model that relaxes this assumption and can model a wider range of customer behavior, such as decoy effects between products. In this model, each customer type is associated with a binary decision tree, which represents a decision process for making a purchase based on checking for the existence of specific products in the assortment. Together with a probability distribution over customer types, we show that the resulting model -- a decision forest -- is able to represent any customer choice model, including models that are inconsistent with weak rationality. We theoretically characterize the depth of the forest needed to fit a data set of historical assortments and prove that with high probability, a forest whose depth scales logarithmically in the number of assortments is sufficient to fit most data sets. We also propose two practical algorithms -- one based on column generation and one based on random sampling -- for estimating such models from data. Using synthetic data and real transaction data exhibiting non-rational behavior, we show that the model outperforms both rational and non-rational benchmark models in out-of-sample predictive ability.

Yi-Chun Chen, Tim Allan Wheeler, Mykel John Kochenderfer

Learning Bayesian networks from raw data can help provide insights into the relationships between variables. While real data often contains a mixture of discrete and continuous-valued variables, many Bayesian network structure learning algorithms assume all random variables are discrete. Thus, continuous variables are often discretized when learning a Bayesian network. However, the choice of discretization policy has significant impact on the accuracy, speed, and interpretability of the resulting models. This paper introduces a principled Bayesian discretization method for continuous variables in Bayesian networks with quadratic complexity instead of the cubic complexity of other standard techniques. Empirical demonstrations show that the proposed method is superior to the established minimum description length algorithm. In addition, this paper shows how to incorporate existing methods into the structure learning process to discretize all continuous variables and simultaneously learn Bayesian network structures.