Pub Date : 2026-02-16DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3665422
Shidong Wang, Renato Pajarola
Automated floor plan generation aims to create residential layouts by arranging rooms within a given boundary, balancing topological, geometric, and aesthetic considerations. The existing methods typically use a multi-step pipeline with intermediate representations to decompose the prediction process into several sub-tasks, limiting model flexibility and imposing predefined solution paths. This often results in unreasonable outputs when applied to data unsuitable for these predefined paths, making it challenging for these methods to match human designers, who do not restrict themselves to a specific set of design workflows. To address these limitations, we introduce CE2EPlan, a controllable end-to-end topology- and geometryenhanced diffusion model, that removes restrictions on the generative process of AI design tools. Instead, it enables the model to learn how to design floor plans directly from data, capturing a wide range of solution paths from input boundaries to complete layouts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses all existing approaches using the multi-step pipeline, delivering higher-quality results with enhanced user control and greater diversity in output, bringing AI design tools closer to the versatility of human designers.
{"title":"Directly from Alpha to Omega: Controllable End-to-End Vector Floor Plan Generation.","authors":"Shidong Wang, Renato Pajarola","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2026.3665422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3665422","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Automated floor plan generation aims to create residential layouts by arranging rooms within a given boundary, balancing topological, geometric, and aesthetic considerations. The existing methods typically use a multi-step pipeline with intermediate representations to decompose the prediction process into several sub-tasks, limiting model flexibility and imposing predefined solution paths. This often results in unreasonable outputs when applied to data unsuitable for these predefined paths, making it challenging for these methods to match human designers, who do not restrict themselves to a specific set of design workflows. To address these limitations, we introduce CE2EPlan, a controllable end-to-end topology- and geometryenhanced diffusion model, that removes restrictions on the generative process of AI design tools. Instead, it enables the model to learn how to design floor plans directly from data, capturing a wide range of solution paths from input boundaries to complete layouts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses all existing approaches using the multi-step pipeline, delivering higher-quality results with enhanced user control and greater diversity in output, bringing AI design tools closer to the versatility of human designers.</p>","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"PP ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146208233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-13DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3664464
Antonia Schlieder, Jan Rummel, Filip Sadlo
In the visual analysis of hierarchical data, a main challenge is comparing data attributes both within and between different levels of the hierarchy. Such tasks are typically addressed using aggregated data, where the attribute of a parent node is calculated from the attributes of its children. Our review of existing literature on visualization methods that encode the hierarchy implicitly (e.g., icicle plots, treemaps) shows that most approaches rely on additive aggregation. Proportional aggregation, where a parent is assigned a weighted average of the values of its children, remains unexplored although relevant in practice. We introduce stalactite plots, a visualization technique that displays proportional aggregation and supports visual value comparison. Our empirical evaluation (N=148, N=50) shows that, with some explanation, stalactite plots are as easily understood as established visualization techniques for hierarchical data. Furthermore, for large datasets, participants are faster and more accurate using our approach.
{"title":"Proportional Aggregation in Hierarchical Data Visualization.","authors":"Antonia Schlieder, Jan Rummel, Filip Sadlo","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2026.3664464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3664464","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the visual analysis of hierarchical data, a main challenge is comparing data attributes both within and between different levels of the hierarchy. Such tasks are typically addressed using aggregated data, where the attribute of a parent node is calculated from the attributes of its children. Our review of existing literature on visualization methods that encode the hierarchy implicitly (e.g., icicle plots, treemaps) shows that most approaches rely on additive aggregation. Proportional aggregation, where a parent is assigned a weighted average of the values of its children, remains unexplored although relevant in practice. We introduce stalactite plots, a visualization technique that displays proportional aggregation and supports visual value comparison. Our empirical evaluation (N=148, N=50) shows that, with some explanation, stalactite plots are as easily understood as established visualization techniques for hierarchical data. Furthermore, for large datasets, participants are faster and more accurate using our approach.</p>","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"PP ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146196165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-12DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3664111
Xinyao Liao, Wanjuan Su, Chen Zhang, Ximeng Li, Wenbing Tao
The reconstruction of realistic and precise human meshes in world coordinates is facilitated by considering scene information. Challenges related to accuracy, robustness, and computation time are faced by existing absolute human mesh recovery methods. In this paper, a one-stage model for absolute human mesh recovery with superior reconstruction precision and inference speed is presented. The proposed one-stage model is composed of two parallel branches to achieve root position estimation and human mesh regression. To effectively connect the two branches, a scene-image information aggregation module is designed. The accuracy of the estimated human meshes is improved and the end-to-end training of the whole model is facilitated by this module. Experiments are conducted on three diverse datasets, and a GMPJPE decrease of 72.3 mm/27.32% and an MPJPE reduction of 25.6 mm/27.26% are achieved by the proposed method with the lowest inference time compared to previous SOTA methods.
{"title":"One-Stage Absolute Human Mesh Recovery.","authors":"Xinyao Liao, Wanjuan Su, Chen Zhang, Ximeng Li, Wenbing Tao","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2026.3664111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3664111","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The reconstruction of realistic and precise human meshes in world coordinates is facilitated by considering scene information. Challenges related to accuracy, robustness, and computation time are faced by existing absolute human mesh recovery methods. In this paper, a one-stage model for absolute human mesh recovery with superior reconstruction precision and inference speed is presented. The proposed one-stage model is composed of two parallel branches to achieve root position estimation and human mesh regression. To effectively connect the two branches, a scene-image information aggregation module is designed. The accuracy of the estimated human meshes is improved and the end-to-end training of the whole model is facilitated by this module. Experiments are conducted on three diverse datasets, and a GMPJPE decrease of 72.3 mm/27.32% and an MPJPE reduction of 25.6 mm/27.26% are achieved by the proposed method with the lowest inference time compared to previous SOTA methods.</p>","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"PP ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146183997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-11DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3646304
Anna Sterzik;Monique Meuschke;Douglas W. Cunningham;Kai Lawonn
This note corrects errors in Figs. 12 and 13 and the description of the parametric function in the paper ”Perceptually Uniform Construction of Illustrative Textures” published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 30, Issue 1, 2024.
本文更正了图12和图13中的错误,以及《IEEE可视化与计算机图形学学报》(IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 30, Issue 1, 2024)上发表的论文“perceptional Uniform Construction of Illustrative Textures”中对参数函数的描述。
{"title":"Corrections to “Perceptually Uniform Construction of Illustrative Textures”","authors":"Anna Sterzik;Monique Meuschke;Douglas W. Cunningham;Kai Lawonn","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2025.3646304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2025.3646304","url":null,"abstract":"This note corrects errors in Figs. 12 and 13 and the description of the parametric function in the paper ”Perceptually Uniform Construction of Illustrative Textures” published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 30, Issue 1, 2024.","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"32 3","pages":"2882-2882"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11393607","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146154439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-10DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663253
Xiaokun Sun, Zhenyu Zhang, Ying Tai, Hao Tang, Zili Yi, Jian Yang
To integrate digital humans into everyday life, there is a strong demand for generating high-quality, fine-grained disentangled 3D avatars that support expressive animation and simulation capabilities, ideally from low-cost textual inputs. Although text-driven 3D avatar generation has made significant progress by leveraging 2D generative priors, existing methods still struggle to fulfill all these requirements simultaneously. To address this challenge, we propose DreamBarbie, a novel text-driven framework for generating animatable 3D avatars with separable shoes, accessories, and simulation-ready garments, truly capturing the iconic "Barbie doll" aesthetic. The core of our framework lies in an expressive 3D representation combined with appropriate modeling constraints. Unlike prior methods, we use G-Shell to uniformly model watertight components (e.g., bodies, shoes) and non-watertight garments. By reformulating boundaries as Euclidean field intersections instead of manifold geodesics, we propose an SDF-based initialization and a hole regularization loss that together achieve a $100times$ speedup and stable open topology without image input. These disentangled 3D representations are then optimized by specialized expert diffusion models tailored to each domain, ensuring high-fidelity outputs. To mitigate geometric artifacts and texture conflicts when combining different expert models, we further propose several effective geometric losses and strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamBarbie outperforms existing methods in both dressed human and outfit generation. Our framework further enables diverse applications, including apparel combination, editing, expressive animation, and physical simulation.
{"title":"DreamBarbie: Text to Barbie-Style 3D Avatars.","authors":"Xiaokun Sun, Zhenyu Zhang, Ying Tai, Hao Tang, Zili Yi, Jian Yang","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663253","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>To integrate digital humans into everyday life, there is a strong demand for generating high-quality, fine-grained disentangled 3D avatars that support expressive animation and simulation capabilities, ideally from low-cost textual inputs. Although text-driven 3D avatar generation has made significant progress by leveraging 2D generative priors, existing methods still struggle to fulfill all these requirements simultaneously. To address this challenge, we propose DreamBarbie, a novel text-driven framework for generating animatable 3D avatars with separable shoes, accessories, and simulation-ready garments, truly capturing the iconic \"Barbie doll\" aesthetic. The core of our framework lies in an expressive 3D representation combined with appropriate modeling constraints. Unlike prior methods, we use G-Shell to uniformly model watertight components (e.g., bodies, shoes) and non-watertight garments. By reformulating boundaries as Euclidean field intersections instead of manifold geodesics, we propose an SDF-based initialization and a hole regularization loss that together achieve a $100times$ speedup and stable open topology without image input. These disentangled 3D representations are then optimized by specialized expert diffusion models tailored to each domain, ensuring high-fidelity outputs. To mitigate geometric artifacts and texture conflicts when combining different expert models, we further propose several effective geometric losses and strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamBarbie outperforms existing methods in both dressed human and outfit generation. Our framework further enables diverse applications, including apparel combination, editing, expressive animation, and physical simulation.</p>","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"PP ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146159703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-10DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663389
Dongdong Yue, Xinyi Liu, Yongjun Zhang, Jinming Zhang, Yong Luo, Zeshuang Zheng, Yi Wan
Although existing texture synthesis methods perform well in generating large images with irregularly repeated textures to avoid visually unrealistic repetitions, they still face significant challenges in synthesizing regular textures with densely interconnected structures. In this paper, we propose a novel neural texture synthesis method, FreNTS, which uses frequency domain information to enhance the texture synthesis process, synthesizing textures with continuous, complete, and visually realistic overall structures. The core idea is to perform the Discrete Cosine Transform on image patches to obtain the corresponding frequency domain rate information features, and then use the designed adaptive guided correspondence (AGC) loss to calculate the correlation difference between the source image and the target image in the frequency domain and spatial domains, thereby constraining the optimization of the target image to achieve high-quality texture synthesis. In addition, to better evaluate the effect of texture synthesis, we introduce Tile LPIPS as the metric for quantitative evaluation. Experimental results show that the proposed FreNTS can effectively accelerate the process of neural texture synthesis and use high-frequency information to capture better structural details to synthesize realistic textures.
{"title":"FreNTS: Neural Texture Synthesis in Frequency Domain.","authors":"Dongdong Yue, Xinyi Liu, Yongjun Zhang, Jinming Zhang, Yong Luo, Zeshuang Zheng, Yi Wan","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663389","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although existing texture synthesis methods perform well in generating large images with irregularly repeated textures to avoid visually unrealistic repetitions, they still face significant challenges in synthesizing regular textures with densely interconnected structures. In this paper, we propose a novel neural texture synthesis method, FreNTS, which uses frequency domain information to enhance the texture synthesis process, synthesizing textures with continuous, complete, and visually realistic overall structures. The core idea is to perform the Discrete Cosine Transform on image patches to obtain the corresponding frequency domain rate information features, and then use the designed adaptive guided correspondence (AGC) loss to calculate the correlation difference between the source image and the target image in the frequency domain and spatial domains, thereby constraining the optimization of the target image to achieve high-quality texture synthesis. In addition, to better evaluate the effect of texture synthesis, we introduce Tile LPIPS as the metric for quantitative evaluation. Experimental results show that the proposed FreNTS can effectively accelerate the process of neural texture synthesis and use high-frequency information to capture better structural details to synthesize realistic textures.</p>","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"PP ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146159693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-10DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663204
Manusha Karunathilaka, Litian Lei, Yiming Gao, Yong Wang, Jiannan Li
In the digital age, readers value quantitative journalism that is clear, concise, analytical, and human-centred. To understand complex topics, they often piece together scattered facts from multiple articles. Visual storytelling can transform fragmented information into clear, engaging narratives, yet its use with unstructured online articles remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we present Compendia, an automated system that analyzes online articles in response to a user's query and generates a coherent data story tailored to the user's informational needs. through two modules covering addresses key challenges of storytelling from unstructured text through two modules covering: Online Article Retrieval, which gathers relevant articles; Data Fact Extraction, which identifies, validates, and refines quantitative facts; Fact Organization, which clusters and merges related facts into coherent thematic groups; and Visual Storytelling, which transforms the organized facts into narratives with visualizations in an interactive scrollytelling interface. We evaluated Compendia through a quantitative analysis, confirming the accuracy in fact extraction and organization, and through two user studies with 16 participants, demonstrating its usability, effectiveness, and ability to produce engaging visual stories for open-ended queries.
{"title":"Compendia: Automated Visual Storytelling Generation from Online Article Collection.","authors":"Manusha Karunathilaka, Litian Lei, Yiming Gao, Yong Wang, Jiannan Li","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663204","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the digital age, readers value quantitative journalism that is clear, concise, analytical, and human-centred. To understand complex topics, they often piece together scattered facts from multiple articles. Visual storytelling can transform fragmented information into clear, engaging narratives, yet its use with unstructured online articles remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we present Compendia, an automated system that analyzes online articles in response to a user's query and generates a coherent data story tailored to the user's informational needs. through two modules covering addresses key challenges of storytelling from unstructured text through two modules covering: Online Article Retrieval, which gathers relevant articles; Data Fact Extraction, which identifies, validates, and refines quantitative facts; Fact Organization, which clusters and merges related facts into coherent thematic groups; and Visual Storytelling, which transforms the organized facts into narratives with visualizations in an interactive scrollytelling interface. We evaluated Compendia through a quantitative analysis, confirming the accuracy in fact extraction and organization, and through two user studies with 16 participants, demonstrating its usability, effectiveness, and ability to produce engaging visual stories for open-ended queries.</p>","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"PP ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146159717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-10DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663425
Lang Nie, Yuan Mei, Kang Liao, Xunqiu Xu, Chunyu Lin, Bin Xiao
We present RopStitch, an unsupervised deep image stitching framework with both robustness and naturalness. To ensure the robustness of RopStitch, we propose to incorporate the universal prior of content perception into the image stitching model by a dual-branch architecture. It separately captures coarse and fine features and integrates them to achieve highly generalizable performance across diverse unseen real-world scenes. Concretely, the dual-branch model consists of a pretrained branch to capture semantically invariant representations and a learnable branch to extract fine-grained discriminative features, which are then merged into a whole by a controllable factor at the correlation level. Besides, considering that content alignment and structural preservation are often contradictory to each other, we propose a concept of virtual optimal planes to relieve this conflict. To this end, we model this problem as a process of estimating homography decomposition coefficients, and design an iterative coefficient predictor and minimal semantic distortion constraint to identify the optimal plane. This scheme is finally incorporated into RopStitch by warping both views onto the optimal plane bidirectionally. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that RopStitch significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scene robustness and content naturalness. The code is available at https://github.com/MmelodYy/RopStitch.
{"title":"Robust Image Stitching with Optimal Plane.","authors":"Lang Nie, Yuan Mei, Kang Liao, Xunqiu Xu, Chunyu Lin, Bin Xiao","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663425","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We present RopStitch, an unsupervised deep image stitching framework with both robustness and naturalness. To ensure the robustness of RopStitch, we propose to incorporate the universal prior of content perception into the image stitching model by a dual-branch architecture. It separately captures coarse and fine features and integrates them to achieve highly generalizable performance across diverse unseen real-world scenes. Concretely, the dual-branch model consists of a pretrained branch to capture semantically invariant representations and a learnable branch to extract fine-grained discriminative features, which are then merged into a whole by a controllable factor at the correlation level. Besides, considering that content alignment and structural preservation are often contradictory to each other, we propose a concept of virtual optimal planes to relieve this conflict. To this end, we model this problem as a process of estimating homography decomposition coefficients, and design an iterative coefficient predictor and minimal semantic distortion constraint to identify the optimal plane. This scheme is finally incorporated into RopStitch by warping both views onto the optimal plane bidirectionally. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that RopStitch significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scene robustness and content naturalness. The code is available at https://github.com/MmelodYy/RopStitch.</p>","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"PP ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146159719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-09DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663050
Arran Zeyu Wang, David Borland, Estella Calcaterra, David Gotz
Understanding how individuals interpret charts is a crucial concern for visual data communication. This imperative has motivated a number of studies, including past work demonstrating that causal priors-a priori belief about causal relationships between concepts-can have significant influences on the perceived strength of variable relationships inferred from visualizations. This paper builds on these previous results, demonstrating that causal priors can also influence the types of patterns that people perceive as the most salient within ambiguous scatterplots that have roughly equal evidence for trend and cluster patterns. Using a mixed-design approach that combines a largescale online experiment for breadth of findings with an in-person think-aloud study for analytical depth, we investigated how users' interpretations are influenced by the interplay between causal priors and the visualized data patterns. Our analysis suggests two archetypal reasoning behaviors through which people often make their observations: contextualization, in which users accept a visual pattern that aligns with causal priors and use their existing knowledge to enrich interpretation, and rationalization, in which users encounter a pattern that conflicts with causal priors and attempt to explain away the discrepancy by invoking external factors, such as positing confounding variables or data selection bias. These findings provide initial evidence highlighting the critical role of causal priors in shaping high-level visualization comprehension, and introduce a vocabulary for describing how users reason about data that either confirms or challenges prior beliefs of causality.
{"title":"Contextualization or Rationalization? The Effect of Causal Priors on Data Visualization Interpretation.","authors":"Arran Zeyu Wang, David Borland, Estella Calcaterra, David Gotz","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663050","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Understanding how individuals interpret charts is a crucial concern for visual data communication. This imperative has motivated a number of studies, including past work demonstrating that causal priors-a priori belief about causal relationships between concepts-can have significant influences on the perceived strength of variable relationships inferred from visualizations. This paper builds on these previous results, demonstrating that causal priors can also influence the types of patterns that people perceive as the most salient within ambiguous scatterplots that have roughly equal evidence for trend and cluster patterns. Using a mixed-design approach that combines a largescale online experiment for breadth of findings with an in-person think-aloud study for analytical depth, we investigated how users' interpretations are influenced by the interplay between causal priors and the visualized data patterns. Our analysis suggests two archetypal reasoning behaviors through which people often make their observations: contextualization, in which users accept a visual pattern that aligns with causal priors and use their existing knowledge to enrich interpretation, and rationalization, in which users encounter a pattern that conflicts with causal priors and attempt to explain away the discrepancy by invoking external factors, such as positing confounding variables or data selection bias. These findings provide initial evidence highlighting the critical role of causal priors in shaping high-level visualization comprehension, and introduce a vocabulary for describing how users reason about data that either confirms or challenges prior beliefs of causality.</p>","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"PP ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146151584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-09DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3662720
Ziyi Xu, Ziyao Huang, Juan Cao, Yong Zhang, Xiaodong Cun, Qing Shuai, Yuchen Wang, Linchao Bao, Fan Tang
The generation of anchor-style product promotion videos presents promising opportunities in e-commerce, advertising, and consumer engagement. Despite advancements in pose-guided human video generation, creating product promotion videos remains challenging. In addressing this challenge, we identify the integration of human-object interactions (HOI) into pose-guided human video generation as a core issue. To this end, we introduce AnchorCrafter, a novel diffusion-based system designed to generate 2D videos featuring a target human and a customized object, achieving high visual fidelity and controllable interactions. Specifically, we propose two key innovations: the HOI-appearance perception, which enhances object appearance recognition from arbitrary multi-view perspectives and disentangles object and human appearance, and the HOI-motion injection, which enables complex human-object interactions by overcoming challenges in object trajectory conditioning and inter-occlusion management. Extensive experiments show that our system improves object appearance preservation by 7.5%, and achieves the best video quality compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. It also outperforms existing approaches in maintaining human motion consistency and high-quality video generation. Project page including data, code, and Huggingface demo: https://github.com/cangcz/AnchorCrafter.
{"title":"AnchorCrafter: Animate Cyber-Anchors Selling Your Products via Human-Object Interacting Video Generation.","authors":"Ziyi Xu, Ziyao Huang, Juan Cao, Yong Zhang, Xiaodong Cun, Qing Shuai, Yuchen Wang, Linchao Bao, Fan Tang","doi":"10.1109/TVCG.2026.3662720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3662720","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The generation of anchor-style product promotion videos presents promising opportunities in e-commerce, advertising, and consumer engagement. Despite advancements in pose-guided human video generation, creating product promotion videos remains challenging. In addressing this challenge, we identify the integration of human-object interactions (HOI) into pose-guided human video generation as a core issue. To this end, we introduce AnchorCrafter, a novel diffusion-based system designed to generate 2D videos featuring a target human and a customized object, achieving high visual fidelity and controllable interactions. Specifically, we propose two key innovations: the HOI-appearance perception, which enhances object appearance recognition from arbitrary multi-view perspectives and disentangles object and human appearance, and the HOI-motion injection, which enables complex human-object interactions by overcoming challenges in object trajectory conditioning and inter-occlusion management. Extensive experiments show that our system improves object appearance preservation by 7.5%, and achieves the best video quality compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. It also outperforms existing approaches in maintaining human motion consistency and high-quality video generation. Project page including data, code, and Huggingface demo: https://github.com/cangcz/AnchorCrafter.</p>","PeriodicalId":94035,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics","volume":"PP ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146151593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}