Schemex: Discovering Structural Abstractions from Examples

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Sitong, Menon, Samia, Li, Dingzeyu, Ma, Xiaojuan, Zemel, Richard, Chilton, Lydia B.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Sitong
Menon, Samia
Li, Dingzeyu
Ma, Xiaojuan
Zemel, Richard
Chilton, Lydia B.
author_facet Wang, Sitong
Menon, Samia
Li, Dingzeyu
Ma, Xiaojuan
Zemel, Richard
Chilton, Lydia B.
contents Creative and communicative work is often underpinned by implicit structures, such as the Hero's Journey in storytelling, design patterns in software, or chord progressions in music. People often learn these structures from examples - a process known as schema induction. However, because schemas are abstract and implicit, they are difficult to discover: shared structural patterns are obscured by surface-level variation, and balancing generality with specificity is challenging. We present Schemex, an interactive AI workflow that systematically supports schema induction by decomposing it into three tractable stages: clustering examples, abstracting candidate schemas, and contrastively refining them by generating new instances and comparing against originals. Studies show that Schemex produces more actionable schemas than a frontier baseline without sacrificing generalizability, with participants uncovering deep and nuanced structural patterns. We also discuss design implications for the cognitive role of interactive process in structure discovery.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Schemex: Discovering Structural Abstractions from Examples
Wang, Sitong
Menon, Samia
Li, Dingzeyu
Ma, Xiaojuan
Zemel, Richard
Chilton, Lydia B.
Human-Computer Interaction
Creative and communicative work is often underpinned by implicit structures, such as the Hero's Journey in storytelling, design patterns in software, or chord progressions in music. People often learn these structures from examples - a process known as schema induction. However, because schemas are abstract and implicit, they are difficult to discover: shared structural patterns are obscured by surface-level variation, and balancing generality with specificity is challenging. We present Schemex, an interactive AI workflow that systematically supports schema induction by decomposing it into three tractable stages: clustering examples, abstracting candidate schemas, and contrastively refining them by generating new instances and comparing against originals. Studies show that Schemex produces more actionable schemas than a frontier baseline without sacrificing generalizability, with participants uncovering deep and nuanced structural patterns. We also discuss design implications for the cognitive role of interactive process in structure discovery.
title Schemex: Discovering Structural Abstractions from Examples
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11795