2026/02/25 by Priyan Vaithilingam, Alan Leung, Jeffrey Nichols +1 · 1 voice
Computer Science · #Data Visualization and Analytics #Frame (networking) #Inference #Innovative Human-Technology Interaction #Natural (archaeology) #Property (philosophy) #Software Engineering Research #Space (punctuation) #Variation (astronomy) #cs.HC
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3772318.3790621
arxiv published 2026/02/25 · arxiv updated 2026/02/25 · openalex publication_date 2026/04/13 · openalex created_date 2026/04/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Front-end developers author UI components to be broadly reusable by parameterizing visual and behavioral properties. While flexible, this makes instantiation harder, as developers must reason about numerous property values and interactions. In practice, they must explore the component’s large design space and provide realistic and natural values to properties. To address this, we introduce distinguishing variations: variations that are both mimetic and distinct. We frame distinguishing variation generation as design-space sampling, combining symbolic inference to identify visually important properties with an LLM-driven mimetic sampler to produce realistic instantiations from its world knowledge.