User prompts for generative AI models are often underspecified or open-ended, which may lead to sub-optimal responses. This prompt underspecification problem is particularly evident in text-to-image (T2I) generation, where users commonly struggle to articulate their precise intent. This disconnect between the user’s vision and the model’s interpretation often forces users to painstakingly and repeatedly refine their prompts. To address this, we propose a design for proactive T2I agents equipped with an interface to actively ask clarification questions when uncertain, and present their understanding of user intent as an interpretable belief graph that a user can edit. We build simple prototypes for such agents and verify their effectiveness through both human studies and automated evaluation. We observed that at least 90% of human subjects found these agents and their belief graphs helpful for their T2I workflow. Moreover, we use a scalable automated evaluation approach using two agents, one with a ground truth image and the other tries to ask as few questions as possible to align with the ground truth. On DesignBench, a benchmark we created for artists and designers, the COCO dataset (Lin et al., 2014) and ImageInWords (Garg et al., 2024), we observed that these T2I agents were able to ask informative questions and elicit crucial information to achieve successful alignment with at least 2 times higher VQAScore (Lin et al., 2024) than the standard single-turn T2I generation.
The dataset includes 30 images containing different objects and scenes.
The images have been sourced from www.unsplash.com, www.pexels.com, www.freepik.com (the licenses for the images are listed below).
Out of the 30 images: 8 contain animals, 9 images contain humans or partial human figures, 15 images contain only inanimate objects and 2 contain only a scene. The dataset contains a variable number of subjects (1-8) per image. Images are captured in different conditions, environments and under different angles.We include a file dataset/prompts_and_classes.json which contains two types of prompts per image: a lengthy detailed prompt and a short concise prompt lacking details. These are the prompts used in the paper for all experiments using DesignBench. The images have been sourced from www.unsplash.com, www.pexels.com, www.freepik.com.
designbench/prompts_and_classes.json file contains a list of all the image names, reference links to the images, and a short and long prompt per image. The images have been cropped from their original form to directly download the cropped version of the photos that was used in the paper visit designbench/images/
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