POEM: Interactive Prompt Optimization for Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive abilities for multimodal content comprehension and reasoning with proper prompting in zero- or few-shot settings. Despite the proliferation of interactive systems developed to support prompt engineering for LLMs across various tasks, most have primarily focused on textual or visual inputs, thus neglecting the complex interplay between modalities within multimodal inputs. This oversight hinders the development of effective prompts that guide model multimodal reasoning processes by fully exploiting the rich context provided by multiple modalities. In this paper, we present POEM, a visual analytics system to facilitate efficient prompt engineering for enhancing the multimodal reasoning performance of LLMs. The system enables users to explore the interaction patterns across modalities at varying levels of detail for a comprehensive understanding of the multimodal knowledge elicited by various prompts. Through diverse recommendations of demonstration examples and instructional principles, POEM supports users in iteratively crafting and refining prompts to better align and enhance model knowledge with human insights. The effectiveness and efficiency of our system are validated through two case studies and interviews with experts.

Dynamic Typography: Bringing Text to Life via Video Diffusion Prior

Text animation serves as an expressive medium, transforming static communication into dynamic experiences by infusing words with motion to evoke emotions, emphasize meanings, and construct compelling narratives. Crafting animations that are semantically aware poses significant challenges, demanding expertise in graphic design and animation. We present an automated text animation scheme, termed "Dynamic Typography", which combines two challenging tasks. It deforms letters to convey semantic meaning and infuses them with vibrant movements based on user prompts. Our technique harnesses vector graphics representations and an end-to-end optimization-based framework. This framework employs neural displacement fields to convert letters into base shapes and applies per-frame motion, encouraging coherence with the intended textual concept. Shape preservation techniques and perceptual loss regularization are employed to maintain legibility and structural integrity throughout the animation process. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach across various text-to-video models and highlight the superiority of our end-to-end methodology over baseline methods, which might comprise separate tasks. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in generating coherent text animations that faithfully interpret user prompts while maintaining readability. Our code is available at: https://animate-your-word.github.io/demo/.

TrafPS: A Shapley-based Visual Analytics Approach to Interpret Traffic

Recent achievements in deep learning (DL) have shown its potential for predicting traffic flows. Such predictions are beneficial for understanding the situation and making decisions in traffic control. However, most state-of-the-art DL models are considered "black boxes" with little to no transparency for end users with respect to the underlying mechanisms. Some previous work tried to "open the black boxes" and increase the interpretability of how predictions are generated. However, it still remains challenging to handle complex models on large-scale spatio-temporal data and discover salient spatial and temporal patterns that significantly influence traffic flows. To overcome the challenges, we present TrafPS, a visual analytics approach for interpreting traffic prediction outcomes to support decision-making in traffic management and urban planning. The measurements, region SHAP and trajectory SHAP, are proposed to quantify the impact of flow patterns on urban traffic at different levels. Based on the task requirement from the domain experts, we employ an interactive visual interface for multi-aspect exploration and analysis of significant flow patterns. Two real-world case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of TrafPS in identifying key routes and decision-making support for urban planning.

Prismatic: Interactive Multi-View Cluster Analysis of Concept Stocks

Financial cluster analysis allows investors to discover investment alternatives and avoid undertaking excessive risks. However, this analytical task faces substantial challenges arising from many pairwise comparisons, the dynamic correlations across time spans, and the ambiguity in deriving implications from business relational knowledge. We propose Prismatic, a visual analytics system that integrates quantitative analysis of historical performance and qualitative analysis of business relational knowledge to cluster correlated businesses interactively. Prismatic features three clustering processes: dynamic cluster generation, knowledge-based cluster exploration, and correlation-based cluster validation. Utilizing a multi-view clustering approach, it enriches data-driven clusters with knowledge-driven similarity, providing a nuanced understanding of business correlations. Through well-coordinated visual views, Prismatic facilitates a comprehensive interpretation of intertwined quantitative and qualitative features, demonstrating its usefulness and effectiveness via case studies on formulating concept stocks and extensive interviews with domain experts.

Where Are We So Far? Understanding Data Storytelling Tools from the Perspective of Human-AI Collaboration

Data storytelling is powerful for communicating data insights, but it requires diverse skills and considerable effort from human creators. Recent research has widely explored the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to support and augment humans in data storytelling. However, there lacks a systematic review to understand data storytelling tools from the perspective of human-AI collaboration, which hinders researchers from reflecting on the existing collaborative tool designs that promote humans' and AI's advantages and mitigate their shortcomings. This paper investigated existing tools with a framework from two perspectives: the stages in the storytelling workflow where a tool serves, including analysis, planning, implementation, and communication, and the roles of humans and AI in each stage, such as creators, assistants, optimizers, and reviewers. Through our analysis, we recognize the common collaboration patterns in existing tools, summarize lessons learned from these patterns, and further illustrate research opportunities for human-AI collaboration in data storytelling.

Storyfier: Exploring Vocabulary Learning Support with Text Generation Models

Vocabulary learning support tools have widely exploited existing materials, e.g., stories or video clips, as contexts to help users memorize each target word. However, these tools could not provide a coherent context for any target words of learners' interests, and they seldom help practice word usage. In this paper, we work with teachers and students to iteratively develop Storyfier, which leverages text generation models to enable learners to read a generated story that covers any target words, conduct a story cloze test, and use these words to write a new story with adaptive AI assistance. Our within-subjects study (N=28) shows that learners generally favor the generated stories for connecting target words and writing assistance for easing their learning workload. However, in the read-cloze-write learning sessions, participants using Storyfier perform worse in recalling and using target words than learning with a baseline tool without our AI features. We discuss insights into supporting learning tasks with generative models.

VideoPro: A Visual Analytics Approach for Interactive Video Programming

Constructing supervised machine learning models for real-world video analysis require substantial labeled data, which is costly to acquire due to scarce domain expertise and laborious manual inspection. While data programming shows promise in generating labeled data at scale with user-defined labeling functions, the high dimensional and complex temporal information in videos poses additional challenges for effectively composing and evaluating labeling functions. In this paper, we propose VideoPro, a visual analytics approach to support flexible and scalable video data programming for model steering with reduced human effort. We first extract human-understandable events from videos using computer vision techniques and treat them as atomic components of labeling functions. We further propose a two-stage template mining algorithm that characterizes the sequential patterns of these events to serve as labeling function templates for efficient data labeling. The visual interface of VideoPro facilitates multifaceted exploration, examination, and application of the labeling templates, allowing for effective programming of video data at scale. Moreover, users can monitor the impact of programming on model performance and make informed adjustments during the iterative programming process. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach with two case studies and expert interviews.

CommonsenseVIS: Visualizing and Understanding Commonsense Reasoning Capabilities of Natural Language Models

Recently, large pretrained language models have achieved compelling performance on commonsense benchmarks. Nevertheless, it is unclear what commonsense knowledge the models learn and whether they solely exploit spurious patterns. Feature attributions are popular explainability techniques that identify important input concepts for model outputs. However, commonsense knowledge tends to be implicit and rarely explicitly presented in inputs. These methods cannot infer models' implicit reasoning over mentioned concepts. We present CommonsenseVIS, a visual explanatory system that utilizes external commonsense knowledge bases to contextualize model behavior for commonsense question-answering. Specifically, we extract relevant commonsense knowledge in inputs as references to align model behavior with human knowledge. Our system features multi-level visualization and interactive model probing and editing for different concepts and their underlying relations. Through a user study, we show that CommonsenseVIS helps NLP experts conduct a systematic and scalable visual analysis of models' relational reasoning over concepts in different situations.

Why is AI not a Panacea for Data Workers? An Interview Study on Human-AI Collaboration in Data Storytelling

Data storytelling plays an important role in data workers' daily jobs since it boosts team collaboration and public communication. However, to make an appealing data story, data workers spend tremendous efforts on various tasks, including outlining and styling the story. Recently, a growing research trend has been exploring how to assist data storytelling with advanced artificial intelligence (AI). However, existing studies may focus on individual tasks in the workflow of data storytelling and do not reveal a complete picture of humans' preference for collaborating with AI. To better understand real-world needs, we interviewed eighteen data workers from both industry and academia to learn where and how they would like to collaborate with AI. Surprisingly, though the participants showed excitement about collaborating with AI, many of them also expressed reluctance and pointed out nuanced reasons. Based on their responses, we first characterize stages and tasks in the practical data storytelling workflows and the desired roles of AI. Then the preferred collaboration patterns in different tasks are identified. Next, we summarize the interviewees' reasons why and why not they would like to collaborate with AI. Finally, we provide suggestions for human-AI collaborative data storytelling to hopefully shed light on future related research.

XNLI: Explaining and Diagnosing NLI-based Visual Data Analysis

Natural language interfaces (NLIs) enable users to flexibly specify analytical intentions in data visualization. However, diagnosing the visualization results without understanding the underlying generation process is challenging. Our research explores how to provide explanations for NLIs to help users locate the problems and further revise the queries. We present XNLI, an explainable NLI system for visual data analysis. The system introduces a Provenance Generator to reveal the detailed process of visual transformations, a suite of interactive widgets to support error adjustments, and a Hint Generator to provide query revision hints based on the analysis of user queries and interactions. Two usage scenarios of XNLI and a user study verify the effectiveness and usability of the system. Results suggest that XNLI can significantly enhance task accuracy without interrupting the NLI-based analysis process.