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1. Bridging the gap in engineering creativity evaluations: exploring novice eye-gaze behavior across design modalities

   https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2025.10092  

   Ka, DukHee; Motamedi, Sanaz; Ahmed, Faez; Tehranchi, Farnaz; Miller, Scarlett (August 2025, Proceedings of the Design Society)

   ABSTRACT: The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) is one of the most effective and commonly used design evaluation methods. However, it fails to capture implicit cognitive processes and has mainly been studied in a homogenous design modality. To bridge this gap, the present study investigates the impact of design ideas represented in different modalities (i.e., text-only, sketch-only, text + sketch) on design evaluations for creativity, novelty, and usefulness, and examine human gaze patterns during the evaluation process. Our findings showed that novice raters exhibit higher interrater reliability and greater convergence in visual attention when rating ideas containing sketches compared to text-only design modality, highlighting the value of visual elements in design evaluations. 

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2. Image synthesis: a review of methods, datasets, evaluation metrics, and future outlook

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-023-10434-2  

   Baraheem, Samah Saeed; Le, Trung-Nghia; Nguyen, Tam V. (February 2023, Artificial Intelligence Review)

   Image synthesis is a process of converting the input text, sketch, or other sources, i.e., another image or mask, into an image. It is an important problem in the computer vision field, where it has attracted the research community to attempt to solve this challenge at a high level to generate photorealistic images. Different techniques and strategies have been employed to achieve this purpose. Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of various image synthesis models covering several aspects. First, the image synthesis concept is introduced. We then review different image synthesis methods divided into three categories: image generation from text, sketch, and other inputs, respectively. Each sub-category is introduced under the proper category based upon the general framework to provide a broad vision of all existing image synthesis methods. Next, brief details of the benchmarked datasets used in image synthesis are discussed along with specifying the image synthesis models that leverage them. Regarding the evaluation, we summarize the metrics used to evaluate the image synthesis models. Moreover, a detailed analysis based on the evaluation metrics of the results of the introduced image synthesis is provided. Finally, we discuss some existing challenges and suggest possible future research directions. 

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3. Deep Learning Methods of Cross-Modal Tasks for Conceptual Design of Product Shapes: A Review

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4056436  

   Li, Xingang; Wang, Ye; Sha, Zhenghui (April 2023, Journal of Mechanical Design)

   Conceptual design is the foundational stage of a design process that translates ill-defined design problems into low-fidelity design concepts and prototypes through design search, creation, and integration. In this stage, product shape design is one of the most paramount aspects. When applying deep learning-based methods to product shape design, two major challenges exist: (1) design data exhibit in multiple modalities and (2) an increasing demand for creativity. With recent advances in deep learning of cross-modal tasks (DLCMTs), which can transfer one design modality to another, we see opportunities to develop artificial intelligence (AI) to assist the design of product shapes in a new paradigm. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of the retrieval, generation, and manipulation methods for DLCMT that involve three cross-modal types: text-to-3D shape, text-to-sketch, and sketch-to-3D shape. The review identifies 50 articles from a pool of 1341 papers in the fields of computer graphics, computer vision, and engineering design. We review (1) state-of-the-art DLCMT methods that can be applied to product shape design and (2) identify the key challenges, such as lack of consideration of engineering performance in the early design phase that need to be addressed when applying DLCMT methods. In the end, we discuss the potential solutions to these challenges and propose a list of research questions that point to future directions of data-driven conceptual design. 

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4. Explaining and Mitigating the Modality Gap in Contrastive Multimodal Learning

   Yaras, Can; Chen, Siyi; Wang, Peng; Qu, Qing (March 2025, Second Conference on Parsimony and Learning (CPAL 2025))

   Multimodal learning has recently gained significant popularity, demonstrating impressive performance across various zero-shot classification tasks and a range of perceptive and generative applications. Models such as Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining (CLIP) are designed to bridge different modalities, such as images and text, by learning a shared representation space through contrastive learning. Despite their success, the working mechanisms of multimodal learning remain poorly understood. Notably, these models often exhibit a \emph{modality gap}, where different modalities occupy distinct regions within the shared representation space. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the emergence of modality gap by characterizing the gradient flow learning dynamics. Specifically, we identify the critical roles of mismatched data pairs and a learnable temperature parameter in causing and perpetuating the modality gap during training. Furthermore, our theoretical insights are validated through experiments on practical CLIP models. These findings provide principled guidance for mitigating the modality gap, including strategies such as appropriate temperature scheduling and modality swapping. Additionally, we demonstrate that closing the modality gap leads to improved performance on tasks such as image-text retrieval. 

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5. Enhancing biomedical search interfaces with images

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbad095  

   Trelles Trabucco, Juan; Arighi, Cecilia; Shatkay, Hagit; Marai, G. Elisabeta; Lengauer, ed., Thomas (July 2023, Bioinformatics Advances)

   Abstract MotivationFigures in biomedical papers communicate essential information with the potential to identify relevant documents in biomedical and clinical settings. However, academic search interfaces mainly search over text fields. ResultsWe describe a search system for biomedical documents that leverages image modalities and an existing index server. We integrate a problem-specific taxonomy of image modalities and image-based data into a custom search system. Our solution features a front-end interface to enhance classical document search results with image-related data, including page thumbnails, figures, captions and image-modality information. We demonstrate the system on a subset of the CORD-19 document collection. A quantitative evaluation demonstrates higher precision and recall for biomedical document retrieval. A qualitative evaluation with domain experts further highlights our solution’s benefits to biomedical search. Availability and implementationA demonstration is available at https://runachay.evl.uic.edu/scholar. Our code and image models can be accessed via github.com/uic-evl/bio-search. The dataset is continuously expanded. 

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