Yi-Chun (Rimi) Chen

Postdoc Associate @ Yale University
Ph.D. in Computer Science | Research Scholar @ North Carolina State University

Email:

yi-chun.chen [at] yale (dot) edu
ychen74 [at] alumni (dot) ncsu (dot) edu

Research Topics

Multimodal Understanding
(Vision & Language)
Artificial Intelligence
Visual Narrative Comprehension & Generation
Human-AI Collaboration
Generative AI

I am a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, working with Dr. Samah Jarad-Fodeh on research at the intersection of visual narrative understanding, generative AI, and multimodal learning.

I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University in 2023, advised by Dr. Arnav Jhala. My dissertation focused on hierarchical models for visual narrative comprehension using knowledge graphs, multimodal sequence modeling, and symbolic reasoning.

My work explores how AI can interpret and generate structured narratives across domains such as comics, games, and health education. I am particularly interested in designing AI tools that support human creativity, narrative reasoning, and adaptive content generation.

I am actively seeking research-driven opportunities as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Assistant Professor, or Research Scientist in AI, narrative technologies, and human–AI collaboration.

Publications

Y.-C. Chen and A. Jhala. “ “Collaborative Comic Generation: Integrating Visual Narrative Theories with AI Models for Enhanced Creativity.” in Proceedings of International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Creativity (CREAI 2024@ECAI), 2024.
F. Freitas, T. Berreth, Y.-C. Chen, and A. Jhala.” Characterizing the perception of urban spaces from visual analytics of street-level imagery.” In AI & society 38 (4), 1361-1371, 2023.
Y.-C. Chen and A. Jhala. “ A Customizable Generator for Comic-Style Visual Narrative.” In arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.02863, 2023.
Y.-C. Chen and A. Jhala. “ Panel Transitions for Genre Analysis in Visual Narratives.” In arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.08695, 2023.
Y.-C. Chen and A. Jhala. “ CPST: Comprehension-Preserving Style Transfer for Multi-Modal Narratives.” In arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.08720, 2023.
Y.-C. Chen and A. Jhala. “A Computational Model of Comprehension in Manga Style Visual Narratives.” In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2021 (Vol. 43, No. 43).
Y.-C. Chen, J. Robertson, and A. Jhal. “Abstractions for Narrative Comprehension Tasks.” In INT/WICED@ AIIDE 2018.
Y.-W. Huang, Y.-C. Chen, W.-Y. Yu, and V.-W. Soo. “Stochastic Negotiation with Market Utility for Automated Power Restoration on a Smart Grid,” The third international workshop on Agent Technology for Energy Systems (ATES2012), in AAMAS 2012.

Research Projects

GameTileNet: Game Material Dataset with Semantic Context
Situation Model for Events in Image Sequences
Collaborative Comic Generation Project
Cognitive Process Simulation Project, Paper
Multimodal Understanding Project, Paper
Document Analysis (Narrative of Image Sequences) Project, Paper
Neural Style Transfer Paper
Image Sequence Generation (Comic Generation) Project, Paper, Code
Street Image Processing Paper, Code
Story Text Reasoning Paper, Code

Other Prototypes

Story Content Authoring Code
Text Visualization Code
Visual Novel Authoring Tool Code
SpotMe! Code

Professional Services

Program Committee Member: CREAI2024@ECAI, IJCAI2025, ECAI2025
Conference Reviewer: CogSci2024, CogSci2025, ACMMM2025
Student Volunteer: AAMAS2011
Invited Talk (Artificial Intelligence for Visual Narrative Comprehension and Generation):
- Mar 2025, Chung Cheng Institute of Technology National Defense University
Poster Presentation (Hierarchical Event Modeling for Multimodal Narrative Comprehension):
- June 2025, Yale University, Postdoctoral Symposium.