marketing teams

Abstract: We present TwinStore, a source-available synthetic consumer platform for physical retail built on vision--language models. TwinStore turns a store into a digital twin---from 82 ready-made formats, a floor-plan image or phone photos of its shelves---and fills it with synthetic shoppers who plan a trip, walk the aisles and decide what to buy by looking at rendered shelves with packs, price tags and promotion signs. Every trip ends in a receipt, so a layout, price, pack or promotion can be tried on the same shoppers before it reaches the store. Around this core, TwinStore provides 3D playback, paired comparisons and layout optimization, shopper interviews, a trade-area model, counterfactual edits of real shelf photos, a marketing studio with eleven tools, and an assistant that turns a plain sentence into a drafted study or an answer grounded in a run's own numbers. In a held-out validation on eleven public datasets, simulated receipts approach the households' own natural variation (category-mix divergence 0.017--0.018 against a real drift of 0.012), price elasticities fall inside the range measured in the field, and three independent decision models agree. TwinStore runs on cloud or on-device models and is distributed with installers for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Abstract: Creative prompt expansion improved overall audiovisual quality scores over raw prompts in a controlled pilot of VideoGen Model 1, our post-trained version of MiniMax H3. We compared the raw, reformatted, and expanded versions of 30 prompts, holding the generator, seed, and sampling settings fixed. Each clip was rated separately on five dimensions. Their mean formed an overall score on a 1-10 scale. Compared with formatting alone, overall scores increased by 0.63 points (95% interval: [+0.11, +1.15]) under VA-Judger and 0.15 points (95% interval: [-0.03, +0.35]) under Gemini 3.8 Flash, whose overall change remained uncertain. Prompt-alignment scores increased by 0.97 points under VA-Judger and 0.50 under Gemini. VA-Judger also showed higher audio quality; visual-quality ratings changed little under either judge.

Abstract: Autonomous video editing from open-world resources remains a challenging problem in multimedia content creation. Retrieval-based methods are constrained by fixed source material and lack creative flexibility, while generative models struggle with long-horizon coherence and often diverge from user intent. Both paradigms fail to replicate the structured, multi-stage reasoning that underlies professional post-production. To address these limitations, we present Auto-Director, a tool-augmented multi-agent framework that mirrors professional editorial workflows: a Planning Agent decomposes abstract topics into fact-grounded scripts via retrieval-augmented planning; a Material Agent indexes open-world footage through shot segmentation and visual tagging; an Editor Agent assembles semantically aligned clips with MLLM-driven spatial adaptation; and a Critic Agent governs an iterative Reflect-and-Revise loop that checks scene-level alignment and pacing. To rigorously evaluate this new paradigm, we introduce VEdit-Bench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated topics with human-annotated Golden Scripts and a five-dimensional metric suite covering Narrative Logic, Factual Accuracy, Semantic Alignment, Compositional Quality, and Stylistic Cohesion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Auto-Director significantly outperforms baseline methods in both automated metrics and human evaluation, effectively bridging the gap between amateurs and professional-grade video production.

Abstract: Next Best Action (NBA) systems must select among customer interventions (e.g., discounts, promotions, and lifecycle actions), maximize long-term economic value, satisfy complex operational constraints, and remain causally grounded. Existing approaches lack a rigorous framework for meeting these requirements jointly. We address this gap by formulating NBA as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). We then integrate off-policy causal correction of the estimated customer dynamics directly into the Linear Programming (LP) formulation of the CMDP. The resulting policy selects actions based on customer states to maximize long-term value while explicitly enforcing business guardrails. Furthermore, the LP formulation yields shadow prices that quantify the economic trade-offs of operational constraints (e.g., fairness and user welfare), enhancing policy interpretability. We validate our proposed offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework on an industry case study involving rideshare coupon targeting, where customer states are defined by Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) stages. We evaluate performance using model-based off-policy evaluation, with causal dynamics estimated from a temporal holdout. Under the observed coupon budget and RFM state representation, our optimized policy improves customer lifetime value (LTV) by 19% over the estimated behavior policy and 8% over a myopic baseline. Although the demonstrated action space is binary, the proposed framework is action-agnostic, yielding a general-purpose decision module for targeting systems that manage multiple interventions.

Abstract: Organizations increasingly rely on social networks to drive product adoption and word-of-mouth diffusion, yet a central challenge is that consumers differ not only in whether they adopt but also in how strongly they subsequently advocate. In particular, individuals who adopt under strong social reinforcement often develop greater conviction and become more persuasive. Existing diffusion models largely abstract away from this mechanism by treating influence strength as static. We introduce a conviction-based diffusion framework, the Pressure Threshold (PT) model, that captures how social reinforcement shapes both adoption and subsequent advocacy. In this model, an individual's influence increases with the cumulative social pressure experienced at adoption, providing a tractable representation of conviction formation while preserving the interpretability of classical threshold-based models. We study the managerial implications of this mechanism through marketing targeting and seeding. We show that accounting for reinforcement fundamentally alters optimal targeting strategies, shifting emphasis toward consumers in cohesive network regions where repeated exposure can amplify downstream word-of-mouth. While reinforcement introduces nonstandard features into the optimization problem, we demonstrate that scalable heuristics remain effective and provide data-dependent performance guarantees. Across synthetic and real-world networks, we find that reinforcement often substantially increases the effectiveness of seeding interventions, particularly in dense and clustered environments where opportunities for social validation are abundant. Using time-stamped social media cascades, we further show that the PT model improves predictive accuracy relative to standard diffusion models, highlighting the empirical relevance of conviction-driven amplification.

Abstract: Text prompting is an indirect interface for poster generation, requiring users to encode inherently two-dimensional composition intent into a one-dimensional sequence of words. We introduce a Spatial Canvas Interface that enables users to directly compose generation intent in space through four complementary binding types: semantic, identity, text, and pixel, together with Text Specifications for individual elements and global appearance. Based on this interface, we develop Compo, a poster generation model adapted from a pretrained image editing model to understand Spatial Canvas inputs and Text Specifications. Compo supports both direct inference, where users explicitly construct the canvas, and agentic mode, where a high-level request is automatically translated into a planned Spatial Canvas. To train Compo, we develop a scalable pipeline that automatically constructs supervision data for different binding types and their combinations, enabling efficient adaptation without training a specialized poster generator from scratch. We further introduce a benchmark that evaluates adherence to individual binding types and their joint composition. Experiments show that Compo achieves stronger compositional controllability than both general-purpose image generation models and dedicated poster generation systems while maintaining high visual quality. By decoupling intent specification from visual generation, our work shifts poster generation from prompting toward composing.

Abstract: Social media is a rich source of real-time public sentiment, but widely used sentiment analysis tools are often applied without understanding their limitations. In this study, we evaluate the inter-rater reliability of three bespoke sentiment analysis tools (TextBlob, VADER, and Twitter-roBERTa-base) and three large language models (LLMs: Qwen3-32B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama-4-Maverick-17B) against six human raters across 100 tweets. We measured agreement using two statistical measures: Cohen's kappa for pairwise comparisons and Fleiss' kappa for multiple raters. Even among the human raters, our results showed only fair agreement, highlighting the subjectivity of sentiment analysis. Higher agreement was observed under the binary sentiment classification (negative vs. non-negative and positive vs. non-positive) than under the three-class classification across both humans and automated tools. The Twitter-roBERTa-base model showed the strongest alignment with human ratings, outperforming both bespoke sentiment tools and LLMs, particularly in distinguishing negative versus non-negative sentiment. LLMs showed substantial agreement among themselves and moderate to substantial alignment with humans, performing better in positive vs. non-positive classifications. Our findings underscore that domain-specific fine-tuning remains crucial for reliable social media sentiment analysis, and human-centered evaluation remains essential for establishing gold-standard labels.

Abstract: AI-generated faces can be difficult to distinguish from real ones, leaving viewers to rely on source labels when judging an image. Yet prior work has made it difficult to separate the effects of what an image actually is from what viewers are told it is. We validated faces as AI-generated or human in an online study (N=169), then crossed actual source (AI, human) with label (none, Made with AI, Made by a human) in a lab study $N=30), recording event-related potentials (ERPs) and gaze. ERP responses were equivalent for AI-generated and real faces, but varied with the label: labels drew early attention (N2), while labels that conflicted with the face's actual source prompted re-evaluation of the face (P3). Affective processing and initial gaze orienting were unchanged, but labels altered visual exploration. We provide a validated stimulus set and evidence that attributed origin shapes face processing, with implications for disclosure design.

Abstract: Large language model writing interfaces often make users steer outputs by repeatedly articulating desired changes in natural language. Yet writers may recognize useful stylistic directions only after seeing alternatives, making revision recall-heavy. We present DimSteer, an authoring interface that samples prompt-local completions, discovers high-variance activation-space axes of variation, labels them, and exposes them as sliders with pole previews, diff comparison, and reset controls. Users can manipulate discovered dimensions, reducing the need to reformulate prompts for each stylistic adjustment. In a within-subjects study with 16 participants against a matched prompt-only baseline, DimSteer reduced mental demand, effort, and frustration while preserving comparable perceived success. Participants valued the surfaced dimensions, yet 15 of 16 disagreed that they would have thought to request the same changes in a prompt. Results suggest prompt-local controls can shift LLM authoring from recall-based prompting toward recognition-based exploration and direct manipulation, while preserving prompting for open-ended edits.

Abstract: Social media increasingly shapes everyday life, serving as both a central venue for discussion of major events and a space where online collective behavior can spill over into real-world activity, while artificial intelligence (AI) is likewise becoming increasingly influential across society. Understanding how different online communities respond to AI-related events, and disentangling the mechanisms underlying the development of such engagement, are therefore increasingly important for studying information spreading and the societal reception of AI. Our work addresses the limited connection between empirical studies of AI-related online engagement and mathematical modeling of group-level spreading dynamics. We develop a framework to collect and organize empirical Bluesky activity into distinct user groups, then use a network-based dynamics model to investigate the mechanisms underlying their engagement. We use the release of DeepSeek R1 as a case study under two complementary grouping schemes: AI-related communities and academic disciplines. For each group, we fit a network-based Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR)-type model augmented with an exogenous engagement term, allowing us to quantify the relative strengths of endogenous network-driven spreading and direct external response. Across groups, we find that strong direct responses to the event do not necessarily coincide with strong network-driven propagation, revealing distinct engagement patterns that may be obscured by aggregate activity alone.

Abstract: Generative AI systems are increasingly used, but aligning their outputs with user requirements poses a continuing challenge. Here, we aim to ensure that the distribution of an attribute of an AI-generated output aligns with a user-specified target. This is motivated by examples such as fairness, where we want to ensure that a protected attribute (e.g., gender, race, or age categories) follows a desired distribution, and synthetic data generation, where we want the generated data to be representative of a target distribution. We study the practically important black-box access setting, where a user can repeatedly query a generative AI model. The goal is to return $m\ge 1$ outputs whose joint attribute distribution is as close as possible to this target. For both exact and approximate alignment, we develop algorithms that minimize the expected number of queries to the generator, and we further demonstrate their optimality as the number of requested outputs $m \rightarrow \infty$. Experiments on text-to-image generation and geocoded persona generation tasks show that our post-processing algorithms improve statistical attribute alignment, complementing prompting-based interventions.

Abstract: Consumers increasingly delegate purchasing decisions to Large Language Models (LLMs) acting as surrogate consumers. Using "Tool-Lab," an adaptation of information-board process tracing that places product attributes behind costly tool calls, we examine how marketing pricing cues (i.e., just-below pricing and promotional framing) influence AI shopping agents. Across eight commercially deployed LLMs from three providers, we trace pre-choice information acquisition. Under zero cost, pricing cues rarely mislead. Imposing acquisition costs under a vague goal prompt leads LLMs to omit diagnostic attributes required to compute unit price and choose suboptimal choices resembling human heuristics. Relative to a specific goal prompt that mainly preserves diagnostic search and choice optimality, a vague goal prompt under constraints creates a search-mediated vulnerability. This research demonstrates that marketing heuristics in delegated AI shopping are governed by storefront information architecture, not necessarily immutable LLM flaws.

Abstract: Persuasive video generation (PVG) is a valuable yet under-explored research topic. Despite the significant advances in multimodal content generation, AI-empowered automated creation of human-made-like videos with substantial persuasiveness remains a formidable challenge. In this paper, we propose CogenPVG, a novel Cognitive-Enhanced reflective multi-agent framework tailored for Persuasive Video Generation task. Given the topic and stance from the user, we decouple the sophisticated generation process into four sequential stages: argument reasoning, storyboard planning, asset creation, and post-editing, imitating the workflow of human video producers. To ensure high persuasiveness, each stage is equipped with a pair of generator and critic agents, following a reflective refinement scheme grounded in a solid psychological theory of persuasion, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). In the argument reasoning stage, we generate highly logical and credible reasoning thoughts under the guidance of critical thinking theory, enabling cognitive enhancement via the central route of the ELM. For the other three stages, we generate and optimize multimodal assets, assembling them into a persuasive video guided by theories of heuristics, as the peripheral route of the ELM. To the best of our knowledge, CogenPVG is the first work focused on general persuasive topics, without being confined to commercial purposes. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis demonstrate that our framework achieves the best persuasion performance, thereby proving the effectiveness of our proposed multi-agent framework for the PVG task.

Abstract: Marketers now deploy generative AI agents as synthetic consumers to pretest visual assets such as logos, packaging, and advertising at a fraction of human-panel cost. However, this procedure assumes that a model seeing a visual cue can also perceive its consumer meaning, which is largely untested. We stress-test the assumption using six canonical visual marketing experiments, varying the two levers managers control: model generation (GPT-4o-mini vs. GPT-5.4-mini) and input format (plain text vs. JSON). Every resulting configuration passed the manipulation checks; however, none of the configurations reproduced more than two of the six human effects, and the remainder were nonsignificant. The one exception was a significant reversal of the human pattern. Providing conceptual or empirical evidence through in-context learning steers average responses toward the human effect. Yet steering has a limit: even when it succeeds, a configuration reproduces less than half of the natural spread of human responses and so understates consumer heterogeneity. We integrate these results into an AI governance protocol (Calibrate, Intervene, Deploy) that delineates when synthetic consumers can responsibly screen creatives and when human panels remain necessary.

Abstract: Editing is a core component of video production, requiring creative planning and decisions under multiple constraints. Here, we report methods for agentic tooling for automated video editing across three tasks varying in editorial goal, complexity and creativity, namely scene previews, video summaries and cinematic trailers. We evaluate the outputs and discuss implications for automation and agency.

Abstract: Collecting survey data is laborious and limited by privacy constraints. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as predictive social simulations. It is unclear whether they can replicate population-level response distributions before and after a healthcare intervention. Using information derived from 4125 women aged 35-59 years, we evaluate whether agents informed solely by pre-intervention profile information can reproduce post-intervention response distributions. Groups of LLM agents (n=50) were created with Gemma 4 E4B and Qwen3.5 9B; conditions ranged from zero-shot prompting to agent profiles enriched with aggregate or individual-level demographic characteristics and pre-intervention questionnaire responses. We compared predicted and observed response distributions with Total Variation Distance (TVD) and Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD). Across both LLMs, profile-based agents improved distributional accuracy relative to zero-shot and random baselines. Nevertheless, direct sampling of 50 real participants remained more accurate. Prediction errors were also higher among participants aged 55-59 years and those living in private property. Errors also varied by question theme and LLM model, with the highest errors observed for cancer fatalism and post intervention attitudes toward genetics. Sensitivity analyses showed that performance was influenced by prompt template changes and temperature hyperparameter. Our results show the potential of LLM-based agents to model behavioral responses to interventions in silico. However, profiles containing additional information beyond demographics did not consistently outperform simpler ones. Certain cultural constructs and population groups also remain inadequately represented by the LLM models evaluated. Future work may include building behaviorally grounded and locally validated virtual populations.