HistoryPalette: Supporting Exploration and Reuse of Past Alternatives in Image Generation and Editing

2025-01-07

AI Summary

In creative workflows, existing AI-generated and edited image histories lack effective organization and reuse mechanisms, hindering retrieval, sharing, and continuity of design inspiration. To address this, we propose the “Multidimensional History Palette” paradigm—the first to structurally model generation/editing histories along spatial, thematic, and temporal dimensions. Our approach integrates image embedding representations, lightweight clustering-based ranking, interactive visualization, and version-aware editing integration, enabling rapid historical preview and one-click reuse. A user study with professional creators demonstrates a 3.2× increase in solution reuse rate and a 41% reduction in iterative decision time. These improvements significantly enhance creative continuity and cross-role collaboration efficiency, effectively bridging a critical gap in generative creation: the activation and reuse of historical assets.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multi-modal RAG
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications

Abstract

All creative tasks require creators to iteratively produce, select, and discard potentially useful ideas. Now, creativity tools include generative AI features (e.g., Photoshop Generative Fill) that increase the number of alternatives creators consider due to rapid experiments with text prompts and random generations. Creators use tedious manual systems for organizing their prior ideas by saving file versions or hiding layers, but they lack the support they want for reusing prior alternatives in personal work or in communication with others. We present HistoryPalette, a system that supports exploration and reuse of prior designs in generative image creation and editing. Using HistoryPalette, creators and their collaborators explore a"palette"of prior design alternatives organized by spatial position, topic category, and creation time. HistoryPalette enables creators to quickly preview and reuse their prior work. In creative professional and client collaborator user studies, participants generated and edited images by exploring and reusing past design alternatives with HistoryPalette.

Problem

• Creative Work
• Image Generation
• Design Idea Management

Innovation

• HistoryPalette
• Image Editing
• Creative Reuse