Hyeonjeong Ha
2025
SYNTHIA: Novel Concept Design with Affordance Composition
Hyeonjeong Ha
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Xiaomeng Jin
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Jeonghwan Kim
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Jiateng Liu
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Zhenhailong Wang
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Khanh Duy Nguyen
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Ansel Blume
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Nanyun Peng
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Kai-Wei Chang
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Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Text-to-image (T2I) models enable rapid concept design, making them widely used in AI-driven design. While recent studies focus on generating semantic and stylistic variations of given design concepts, –the integration of multiple affordances into a single coherent concept–remains largely overlooked. In this paper, we introduce SYNTHIA, a framework for generating novel, functionally coherent designs based on desired affordances. Our approach leverages a hierarchical concept ontology that decomposes concepts into parts and affordances, serving as a crucial building block for functionally coherent design. We also develop a curriculum learning scheme based on our ontology that contrastively fine-tunes T2I models to progressively learn affordance composition while maintaining visual novelty. To elaborate, we (i) gradually increase affordance distance, guiding models from basic concept-affordance association to complex affordance compositions that integrate parts of distinct affordances into a single, coherent form, and (ii) enforce visual novelty by employing contrastive objectives to push learned representations away from existing concepts. Experimental results show that SYNTHIA outperforms state-of-the-art T2I models, demonstrating absolute gains of 25.1% and 14.7% for novelty and functional coherence in human evaluation, respectively.
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- Ansel Blume 1
- Kai-Wei Chang 1
- Heng Ji 1
- Xiaomeng Jin 1
- Jeonghwan Kim 1
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