Text-to-image (T2I) customization aims to create images that embody specific visual concepts delineated in textual descriptions. However, existing works still face a main challenge, concept overfitting. To tackle this challenge, we first analyze overfitting, categorizing it into concept-agnostic overfitting, which undermines non-customized concept knowledge, and concept-specific overfitting, which is confined to customize on limited modalities, i.e, backgrounds, layouts, styles. To evaluate the overfitting degree, we further introduce two metrics, i.e, Latent Fisher divergence and Wasserstein metric to measure the distribution changes of non-customized and customized concept respectively. Drawing from the analysis, we propose Infusion, a T2I customization method that enables the learning of target concepts to avoid being constrained by limited training modalities, while preserving non-customized knowledge. Remarkably, Infusion achieves this feat with remarkable efficiency, requiring a mere 11KB of trained parameters. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both single and multi-concept customized generation.
Compositional Customized Image Generation aims to customize multiple target concepts within generation content, which has gained attention for its wild application. Existing approaches mainly concentrate on the target entity's appearance preservation, while neglecting the fine-grained interaction control among target entities. To enable the model of such interaction control capability, we focus on human object interaction scenario and propose the task of Customized Human Object Interaction Image Generation(CHOI), which simultaneously requires identity preservation for target human object and the interaction semantic control between them. Two primary challenges exist for CHOI:(1)simultaneous identity preservation and interaction control demands require the model to decompose the human object into self-contained identity features and pose-oriented interaction features, while the current HOI image datasets fail to provide ideal samples for such feature-decomposed learning.(2)inappropriate spatial configuration between human and object may lead to the lack of desired interaction semantics. To tackle it, we first process a large-scale dataset, where each sample encompasses the same pair
Customizing text-to-image (T2I) models has seen tremendous progress recently, particularly in areas such as personalization, stylization, and conditional generation. However, expanding this progress to video generation is still in its infancy, primarily due to the lack of customized video data. In this work, we introduce Still-Moving, a novel generic framework for customizing a text-to-video (T2V) model, without requiring any customized video data. The framework applies to the prominent T2V design where the video model is built over a text-to-image (T2I) model (e.g., via inflation). We assume access to a customized version of the T2I model, trained only on still image data (e.g., using DreamBooth or StyleDrop). Naively plugging in the weights of the customized T2I model into the T2V model often leads to significant artifacts or insufficient adherence to the customization data. To overcome this issue, we train lightweight $\textit{Spatial Adapters}$ that adjust the features produced by the injected T2I layers. Importantly, our adapters are trained on $\textit{"frozen videos"}$ (i.e., repeated images), constructed from image samples generated by the customized T2I model. This trainin
Text-to-image generation models have seen considerable advancement, catering to the increasing interest in personalized image creation. Current customization techniques often necessitate users to provide multiple images (typically 3-5) for each customized object, along with the classification of these objects and descriptive textual prompts for scenes. This paper questions whether the process can be made more user-friendly and the customization more intricate. We propose a method where users need only provide images along with text for each customization topic, and necessitates only a single image per visual concept. We introduce the concept of a ``multi-modal prompt'', a novel integration of text and images tailored to each customization concept, which simplifies user interaction and facilitates precise customization of both objects and scenes. Our proposed paradigm for customized text-to-image generation surpasses existing finetune-based methods in user-friendliness and the ability to customize complex objects with user-friendly inputs. Our code is available at $\href{https://github.com/zhongzero/Multi-Modal-Prompt}{https://github.com/zhongzero/Multi-Modal-Prompt}$.
Large language models (LLMs) have facilitated significant strides in generating conversational agents, enabling seamless, contextually relevant dialogues across diverse topics. However, the existing LLM-driven conversational agents have fixed personalities and functionalities, limiting their adaptability to individual user needs. Creating personalized agent personas with distinct expertise or traits can address this issue. Nonetheless, we lack knowledge of how people customize and interact with agent personas. In this research, we investigated how users customize agent personas and their impact on interaction quality, diversity, and dynamics. To this end, we developed CloChat, an interface supporting easy and accurate customization of agent personas in LLMs. We conducted a study comparing how participants interact with CloChat and ChatGPT. The results indicate that participants formed emotional bonds with the customized agents, engaged in more dynamic dialogues, and showed interest in sustaining interactions. These findings contribute to design implications for future systems with conversational agents using LLMs.
Image customization has been extensively studied in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, leading to impressive outcomes and applications. With the emergence of text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models, its temporal counterpart, motion customization, has not yet been well investigated. To address the challenge of one-shot video motion customization, we propose Customize-A-Video that models the motion from a single reference video and adapts it to new subjects and scenes with both spatial and temporal varieties. It leverages low-rank adaptation (LoRA) on temporal attention layers to tailor the pre-trained T2V diffusion model for specific motion modeling. To disentangle the spatial and temporal information during training, we introduce a novel concept of appearance absorbers that detach the original appearance from the reference video prior to motion learning. The proposed modules are trained in a staged pipeline and inferred in a plug-and-play fashion, enabling easy extensions to various downstream tasks such as custom video generation and editing, video appearance customization and multiple motion combination. Our project page can be found at https://customize-a-video.github.io.
User interface (UI) personalization can improve usability and user experience. However, current systems offer limited opportunities for customization, and third-party solutions often require significant effort and technical skills beyond the reach of most users, impeding the future adoption of interface personalization. In our research, we explore the concept of UI customization for the self and others. We performed a two-week study where nine participants used a custom-designed tool that allows websites' UI customization for oneself and to create and reply to customization assistance requests from others. Results suggest that people enjoy customizing for others more than for themselves. They see requests as challenges to solve and are motivated by the positive feeling of helping others. To customize for themselves, people need help with the creative process. We discuss challenges and opportunities for future research seeking to democratize access to personalized UIs, particularly through community-based approaches.
Customers' load profiles are critical resources to support data analytics applications in modern power systems. However, there are usually insufficient historical load profiles for data analysis, due to the collection cost and data privacy issues. To address such data shortage problems, load profiles synthesis is an effective technique that provides synthetic training data for customers to build high-performance data-driven models. Nonetheless, it is still challenging to synthesize high-quality load profiles for each customer using generation models trained by the respective customer's data owing to the high heterogeneity of customer load. In this paper, we propose a novel customized load profiles synthesis method based on conditional diffusion models for heterogeneous customers. Specifically, we first convert the customized synthesis into a conditional data generation issue. We then extend traditional diffusion models to conditional diffusion models to realize conditional data generation, which can synthesize exclusive load profiles for each customer according to the customer's load characteristics and application demands. In addition, to implement conditional diffusion models, we
Most text-to-image customization techniques fine-tune models on a small set of \emph{personal concept} images captured in minimal contexts. This often results in the model becoming overfitted to these training images and unable to generalize to new contexts in future text prompts. Existing customization methods are built on the success of effectively representing personal concepts as textual embeddings. Thus, in this work, we resort to diversifying the context of these personal concepts \emph{solely} within the textual space by simply creating a contextually rich set of text prompts, together with a widely used self-supervised learning objective. Surprisingly, this straightforward and cost-effective method significantly improves semantic alignment in the textual space, and this effect further extends to the image space, resulting in higher prompt fidelity for generated images. Additionally, our approach does not require any architectural modifications, making it highly compatible with existing text-to-image customization methods. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our approach by combining it with four different baseline methods, achieving notable CLIP score improvements.
Recent text-to-image generation models have demonstrated impressive capability of generating text-aligned images with high fidelity. However, generating images of novel concept provided by the user input image is still a challenging task. To address this problem, researchers have been exploring various methods for customizing pre-trained text-to-image generation models. Currently, most existing methods for customizing pre-trained text-to-image generation models involve the use of regularization techniques to prevent over-fitting. While regularization will ease the challenge of customization and leads to successful content creation with respect to text guidance, it may restrict the model capability, resulting in the loss of detailed information and inferior performance. In this work, we propose a novel framework for customized text-to-image generation without the use of regularization. Specifically, our proposed framework consists of an encoder network and a novel sampling method which can tackle the over-fitting problem without the use of regularization. With the proposed framework, we are able to customize a large-scale text-to-image generation model within half a minute on single
Image-text contrastive learning models such as CLIP have demonstrated strong task transfer ability. The high generality and usability of these visual models is achieved via a web-scale data collection process to ensure broad concept coverage, followed by expensive pre-training to feed all the knowledge into model weights. Alternatively, we propose REACT, REtrieval-Augmented CusTomization, a framework to acquire the relevant web knowledge to build customized visual models for target domains. We retrieve the most relevant image-text pairs (~3% of CLIP pre-training data) from the web-scale database as external knowledge, and propose to customize the model by only training new modualized blocks while freezing all the original weights. The effectiveness of REACT is demonstrated via extensive experiments on classification, retrieval, detection and segmentation tasks, including zero, few, and full-shot settings. Particularly, on the zero-shot classification task, compared with CLIP, it achieves up to 5.4% improvement on ImageNet and 3.7% on the ELEVATER benchmark (20 datasets).
Text-to-image diffusion models can generate diverse, high-fidelity images based on user-provided text prompts. Recent research has extended these models to support text-guided image editing. While text guidance is an intuitive editing interface for users, it often fails to ensure the precise concept conveyed by users. To address this issue, we propose Custom-Edit, in which we (i) customize a diffusion model with a few reference images and then (ii) perform text-guided editing. Our key discovery is that customizing only language-relevant parameters with augmented prompts improves reference similarity significantly while maintaining source similarity. Moreover, we provide our recipe for each customization and editing process. We compare popular customization methods and validate our findings on two editing methods using various datasets.
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to capture user's current intentions and provide recommendations through real-time multi-turn conversational interactions. As a human-machine interactive system, it is essential for CRS to improve the user experience. However, most CRS methods neglect the importance of user experience. In this paper, we propose two key points for CRS to improve the user experience: (1) Speaking like a human, human can speak with different styles according to the current dialogue context. (2) Identifying fine-grained intentions, even for the same utterance, different users have diverse finegrained intentions, which are related to users' inherent preference. Based on the observations, we propose a novel CRS model, coined Customized Conversational Recommender System (CCRS), which customizes CRS model for users from three perspectives. For human-like dialogue services, we propose multi-style dialogue response generator which selects context-aware speaking style for utterance generation. To provide personalized recommendations, we extract user's current fine-grained intentions from dialogue context with the guidance of user's inherent preferences. Finally, to
Customization has long been a central goal in interactive systems, yet prior work shows that end-user tailoring occurs infrequently and is often confined to initial setup or moments of breakdown. Recent advances in generative AI suggest that highly malleable systems-where users can modify system behavior through natural language-are now technically feasible. However, it remains unclear how such malleability is used in practice: What kinds of customizations do users create, when do they choose to customize, and how do these modifications shape their experience of everyday tools? We present a design probe that uses a conversationally customizable email system as an instrument to study how users create and refine functionality within everyday tools. The system allows users to iteratively modify their inbox by restructuring categories, introducing interface elements, and authoring new workflow behaviors directly through natural language interaction. We study how participants create, refine, and use these features over several days within their own email workflows. We find that users' customizations are often grounded in existing patterns, which they adapt and specialize to fit their ne
Particle effects are widely used in games and animation to simulate natural phenomena or stylized visual effects. However, creating effect artworks is challenging for non-expert users due to their lack of specialized skills, particularly in finding particle effects with kinematic behaviors that match their intent. To address these issues, we present KinemaFX, a kinematic-driven interactive system, to assist non-expert users in constructing customized particle effect artworks. We propose a conceptual model of particle effects that captures both semantic features and kinematic behaviors. Based on the model, KinemaFX adopts a workflow powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) that supports intent expression through combined semantic and kinematic inputs, while enabling implicit preference-guided exploration and subsequent creation of customized particle effect artworks based on exploration results. Additionally, we developed a kinematic-driven method to facilitate efficient interactive particle effect search within KinemaFX via structured representation and measurement of particle effects. To evaluate KinemaFX, we illustrate usage scenarios and conduct a user study employing an ablation
As large language models (LLMs) transition from research prototypes to real-world systems, customization has emerged as a central bottleneck. While text prompts can already customize LLM behavior, we argue that text-only prompting does not constitute a suitable control interface for scalable, stable, and inference-only customization. This position paper argues that model providers should expose \emph{vector prompt inputs} as part of the public interface for customizing LLMs. We support this position with diagnostic evidence showing that vector prompt tuning continues to improve with increasing supervision whereas text-based prompt optimization saturates early, and that vector prompts exhibit dense, global attention patterns indicative of a distinct control mechanism. We further discuss why inference-only customization is increasingly important under realistic deployment constraints, and why exposing vector prompts need not fundamentally increase model leakage risk under a standard black-box threat model. We conclude with a call to action for the community to rethink prompt interfaces as a core component of LLM customization.
Existing visual assistive technologies are built for simple and common use cases, and have few avenues for blind people to customize their functionalities. Drawing from prior work on DIY assistive technology, this paper investigates end-user programming as a means for users to create and customize visual access programs to meet their unique needs. We introduce ProgramAlly, a system for creating custom filters for visual information, e.g., 'find NUMBER on BUS', leveraging three end-user programming approaches: block programming, natural language, and programming by example. To implement ProgramAlly, we designed a representation of visual filtering tasks based on scenarios encountered by blind people, and integrated a set of on-device and cloud models for generating and running these programs. In user studies with 12 blind adults, we found that participants preferred different programming modalities depending on the task, and envisioned using visual access programs to address unique accessibility challenges that are otherwise difficult with existing applications. Through ProgramAlly, we present an exploration of how blind end-users can create visual access programs to customize and c
With the rise of AI-based code generation, customizing existing code out of natural language instructions to modify visual results -such as figures or images -has become possible, promising to reduce the need for deep programming expertise. However, even experienced developers can struggle with this task, as it requires identifying relevant code regions (feature location), generating valid code variants, and ensuring the modifications reliably align with user intent. In this paper, we introduce vTikZ, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to customize code while preserving coherent visual outcomes. Our benchmark consists of carefully curated vTikZ editing scenarios, parameterized ground truths, and a reviewing tool that leverages visual feedback to assess correctness. Empirical evaluation with stateof-the-art LLMs shows that existing solutions struggle to reliably modify code in alignment with visual intent, highlighting a gap in current AI-assisted code editing approaches. We argue that vTikZ opens new research directions for integrating LLMs with visual feedback mechanisms to improve code customization tasks in various domains beyond
While videos have become increasingly prevalent in delivering information across different educational and professional contexts, individuals with ADHD often face attention challenges when watching informational videos due to the dynamic, multimodal, yet potentially distracting video elements. To understand and address this critical challenge, we designed FocusView, a video customization interface that allows viewers with ADHD to customize informational videos from different aspects. We evaluated FocusView with 12 participants with ADHD and found that FocusView significantly improved the viewability of videos by reducing distractions. Through the study, we uncovered participants' diverse perceptions of video distractions (e.g., background music as a distraction vs. stimulation boost) and their customization preferences, highlighting unique ADHD-relevant needs in designing video customization interfaces (e.g., reducing the number of options to avoid distraction caused by customization itself). We further derived design considerations for future video customization systems for the ADHD community.
Image customization, a crucial technique for industrial media production, aims to generate content that is consistent with reference images. However, current approaches conventionally separate image customization into position-aware and position-free customization paradigms and lack a universal framework for diverse customization, limiting their applications across various scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose IC-Custom, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates position-aware and position-free image customization through in-context learning. IC-Custom concatenates reference images with target images to a polyptych, leveraging DiT's multi-modal attention mechanism for fine-grained token-level interactions. We propose the In-context Multi-Modal Attention (ICMA) mechanism, which employs learnable task-oriented register tokens and boundary-aware positional embeddings to enable the model to effectively handle diverse tasks and distinguish between inputs in polyptych configurations. To address the data gap, we curated a 12K identity-consistent dataset with 8K real-world and 4K high-quality synthetic samples, avoiding the overly glossy, oversaturated look typical of s