NovaVision

NovaVision generates an image from the emotion of a sentence, then checks whether the image actually conveys that emotion by recovering the emotion back from it with a swappable probe and comparing it to what you asked for. It is two things sharing one pipeline, a text-to-art web app and an emotion-controllability benchmark, built around the failure modes that make such a measurement easy to fake, with a frozen text benchmark (AffectBench) and a full write-up behind it.

Using it

• Run make setup then make test to exercise the deterministic core with no model downloads, then make setup-ml and make app to launch the web app at http://127.0.0.1:8000 and generate emotion-conditioned images interactively.
• make smoke is a quick end-to-end run (2 subjects, 1 seed); make pilot reproduces the committed CPU pilot (n=14 per tier).
• Build the text benchmark with make benchmark (AffectBench from GoEmotions), then run the text-conditioned track with make text.
• For a public deployment, bind explicitly with NOVA_PUBLIC=1 and set NOVA_API_TOKEN, NOVA_RATE_LIMIT, and NOVA_MAX_CONCURRENCY; the app binds 127.0.0.1 by default. Serve with make serve-prod (gunicorn) rather than the built-in development server.
• Deploying on Hugging Face Spaces: app.py is the Gradio entry point; copy the spaces_config.yaml block into the Space's README frontmatter.

Screenshots

Results

A CPU pilot: 256-px, 2 content subjects, single seed, n=14 per conditioning tier (n=7 for scene), diffusers backend with stabilityai/sd-turbo and openai/clip-vit-base-patch32.

What this pilot reports is not a controllability score, it is a calibration of the instrument. The committed pilot is an honest null: no conditioning tier beats the shuffled-label control, so recovery is statistically indistinguishable from chance label agreement. The protocol, floors, and diagnostics all run end to end; the binding limitation is the probe.

Condition	Recovery acc [95% CI]	Macro-F1	Valence rho [95% CI]	Arousal rho [95% CI]	CLIP-T	Shuffled-label p	n	Reading
raw (neg. control)	0.143 [0.00, 0.357]	0.038	0.076 [-0.47, 0.55]	0.546 [-0.00, 0.90]	0.280	0.857	14	sits exactly at chance (1/7)
emotion	0.214 [0.00, 0.429]	0.112	0.474 [-0.03, 0.78]	0.474 [-0.03, 0.80]	0.274	0.226	14	not above the circularity baseline
affect	0.214 [0.00, 0.429]	0.133	0.241 [-0.30, 0.65]	0.618 [0.19, 0.86]	0.270	0.137	14	not above the circularity baseline
scene (pos. control)	0.286 [0.00, 0.575]	0.184	0.414 [-0.63, 1.00]	0.582 [-0.43, 0.99]	n/a	0.145	7	highest, but still n.s.

Chance = 0.143 (1/7); majority-class baseline = 0.143. Probe health: 2/7 labels used, neutral predicted for ~90% of items (majority_rate 0.9048).

Paired contrasts (bootstrap on per-item recovery):

Contrast	Delta accuracy	95% CI	p
emotion vs raw	+0.071	[0.000, 0.214]	0.255
affect vs emotion	+0.000	[0.000, 0.000]	1.000
affect vs raw	+0.071	[0.000, 0.214]	0.255

• The raw negative control sits exactly at chance (1/7), and scene at 0.286 is the highest tier but still not significant.
• The CLIP ViT-B/32 probe collapses in-domain onto neutral, predicting it for ~90% of generated scenes and using only 2 of 7 labels.
• The one apparent lift is a single image and not significant: emotion over raw is +0.071 (95% CI [0.000, 0.214], p=0.255), and affect adds nothing over emotion (delta 0.000, p=1.000).
• Out of domain on faces (n=200), CLIP recovers the Ekman emotion at only 29.0% accuracy (macro-F1 0.22), usable for neutral (recall 0.81) and anger (0.61) but near-random for surprise, fear, sadness, and disgust.

The full write-up, figures, and confidence intervals are in paper/paper.md.

Limitations & intended use

Read the headline number as a calibration of the instrument, not a controllability score. The committed pilot is an honest null.

• The probe is the binding limitation. Recovery is measured by an off-the-shelf CLIP ViT-B/32 probe, which is a proxy for human perception. It reads real emotional scenes at 40.3% (EmoSet, all seven labels used) yet collapses onto neutral on the pilot's generated 256-px scenes (2 of 7 labels), so the degeneracy implicates the generated images as much as the probe. Until the probe-generator pair resolves more than two emotions on generated scenes, no recovery number, including a null, is interpretable as controllability, which is why the powered run is deliberately withheld.
• A chance-level result is uninformative on its own. A probe collapsed onto one label scores at the majority-class baseline (= chance on balanced labels) regardless of the image, so "raw at chance" is consistent with both a working protocol and a broken probe. Every number is reported beside its majority baseline and the probe_health collapse diagnostic.
• Small n. The committed pilot is n=14 per tier (n=7 for scene) at a single seed; bootstrap CIs on valence/arousal span most of [-1, 1] and no tier clears the shuffled-label control. The harness loops seeds and pairs contrasts, but seed variance is only estimated once the powered configuration is run.
• "Emotional controllability" is subjective. The target labels are the six Ekman emotions plus neutral: a coarse, culturally-situated scheme that omits mixed and compound affect; whether a rendered image "conveys" an emotion is a human judgement the CLIP proxy only approximates. Mixed/compound emotions are out of scope.
• Emotion-label validity. The text track derives from GoEmotions, which is Reddit-English with modest Ekman-level inter-annotator agreement (κ ≈ 0.33 to 0.44) and demographic skew; AffectBench inherits that bias and rare classes (notably disgust) are underpowered. Labels are text-emotion labels, not image-affect ground truth.
• Not for deployment. This is a research protocol, harness, and single-generator/single-probe pilot, not a product, an emotion-recognition system, or an affective-state detector. Do not use it to infer, score, or act on any person's emotions, and do not treat its outputs as a validated measure of what an image makes people feel. The web app is a demo of the pipeline, not a service.

How it works

• Detect: a DistilRoBERTa classifier (affect/analyzer.py) scores the six Ekman emotions plus neutral (seven labels) in the input text.
• Ground: valence and arousal are estimated from an affect lexicon (affect/lexicon.py) and blended with the emotion's circumplex prior by lexical coverage c, v = c·v_lex + (1-c)·v_prior, so affect is measured from text rather than read from a constant. Function words are skipped, simple negation flips valence, and c is capped at 0.8 so the prior is never fully discarded.
• Condition: image content stays independent of the emotion; emotion enters only as a modifier over four tiers (raw → naive → emotion → affect). The tiers are the ablation, so recovery is attributable to the conditioning, not a canned scene.
• Generate: Stable Diffusion Turbo renders the image from a fixed, paired-per-item seed through a common ImageBackend (null for tests, diffusers for local, hf-api for hosted).
• Recover: a swappable probe (default CLIPProbe, eval/probes.py) reads the emotion and graded valence/arousal back from the image; recovery only counts when it clears the majority-class baseline and the shuffled-label control with a non-degenerate probe.

Method

• Decoupled content. The depicted subject is never chosen by the emotion (a 20-subject neutral content bank, data/content_bank.txt), so any signal must come through the modifier, not the scene.
• Two floors bound the claim. raw is the negative control (no emotion, should sit at chance 1/7) and scene is the positive control and template ceiling, so scene > raw checks the instrument is not blind.
• Shuffled-label control. A one-sided permutation test (n=2000) of each tier against randomly reassigned targets quantifies the circularity baseline directly; recovery is evidence only when it clears this null.
• Probe-collapse diagnostic. Every run emits probe_health (label diversity and majority-collapse rate) and reports the majority-class baseline beside each accuracy, because a collapsed probe scores at chance on raw trivially.
• Probe validation as a known-error instrument. Measured ceilings: on EmoSet scenes (n=400) ViT-B/32 recovers 40.3% and ViT-L/14 45.5%, both using all seven labels; on faces (n=200) 29.0% vs 37.5%. The L/14 edge is significant per set under an exact paired McNemar test (p=0.038 and p=0.040; scripts/compare_probes.py regenerates it from results/paper/probe_validation*.json). An independent non-CLIP probe (--probe hf, make robustness) and a human study (eval/human_study.py, Cohen's kappa) slot into the same interface.
• Pure-numpy, unit-tested statistics. Accuracy, macro-F1, confusion, Pearson r and Spearman rho with bootstrap 95% CIs, paired bootstrap contrasts, and Cohen's kappa (eval/metrics.py).
• Full provenance. results.json logs git SHA, Python and library versions, device, dtype, model and dataset revisions, and the benchmark hash; tables and figures are regenerated by scripts, never hand-written.
• AffectBench hygiene. Single-label GoEmotions mapped to seven Ekman classes from the test split, with within-sample and cross-split dedup so no eval sentence could have been trained on; the build records realized per-class counts and a balanced flag.

Tech stack

Layer	Tools
ML / NLP	PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, Diffusers (SD-Turbo), CLIP (ViT-B/32), DistilRoBERTa emotion classifier
Application	Python, Flask (server.py), Gradio (app.py), flask-cors
Data / research	NumPy, Pillow, pydantic / pydantic-settings, matplotlib, Hugging Face datasets (GoEmotions, EmoSet)
Tooling / CI	pytest, ruff (lint + format), mypy, gitleaks, pip-audit, GitHub Actions (Python 3.9-3.12), Docker, uv

Reproduce

make setup          # core + dev deps (deterministic core, tests, lint)
make test           # the test suite, no models needed (runs in seconds)
make lint           # ruff check + format

# Run the real models (downloads SD-Turbo, CLIP, the emotion classifier):
make setup-ml
make app            # launch the web app at http://127.0.0.1:8000
make smoke          # quick end-to-end run (2 subjects, 1 seed)

# Reproduce the paper artifacts:
make repro-check    # re-derive the committed headline numbers from the committed records (no models)
make power          # sample-size analysis for the powered run (no models)
make pilot          # the committed CPU pilot (256-px, 2 subjects, 1 seed -> n=14)
make reproduce      # canonical content-track run, 512-px, 3 seeds (needs a GPU box)
make validate-probe         # probe error on faces (out-of-domain proxy)
make validate-probe-scene   # in-domain probe ceiling on EmoSet scenes
make paper          # regenerate the paper tables/figures from results/paper/results.json

# Exact paper environment:
uv pip install -r requirements.lock

No local setup? reproduce.ipynb runs the whole thing in Colab: clone, install, test, re-derive the numbers, and (optionally) regenerate the pilot with the real models.

Requires Python 3.9 to 3.12 (all tested in CI). The pilot results and figures are committed under results/paper/, so make paper and the 198 tests run without re-downloading models or raw data. make repro-check re-derives every headline number in the table above from the committed raw per-example records (results/paper/results.json, pure numpy) and fails on any drift, so the reported numbers stay locked to the outputs they came from.

Submit a system

The harness scores any generator and probe under the same protocol. After a run, make submission SYSTEM="your system" emits a leaderboard entry validated against benchmark/submission.schema.json; numbers are copied from results.json, never hand-entered, so every submission is auditable.

System	Track	raw	emotion	affect	scene	Shuffled-label cleared?
SD-Turbo + CLIP ViT-B/32 (committed pilot)	content	0.143	0.214	0.214	0.286	no (honest null)

Future scope

The ordered GPU-day checklist with acceptance gates is in RUNBOOK.md.

• Rerun the pilot under ViT-L/14, significantly stronger than B/32 in both validations (paired McNemar p<0.05 per set; 45.5% vs 40.3% on EmoSet), and the independent non-CLIP probe (--probe hf); the acceptance gate is no collapse on generated scenes
• The powered run (make reproduce: 512-px, 20 subjects, 3 seeds, n=420) on a GPU box, once a non-degenerate probe clears the in-domain ceiling
• Scale the human study to 3+ raters and report Cohen's kappa against the probe
• Cross-system comparison across generators, styles, and probes to turn this into a ranking benchmark, including EmoGen, EmotiCrafter, and CoEmoGen
• Mixed and compound emotions beyond the Ekman set

Contributing

• Setup, test, and reproduction steps: CONTRIBUTING.md
• Participation is governed by the Code of Conduct
• Vulnerabilities go through the security policy
• Powered-run analysis is locked in the preregistration; intended use and limits are in the model card

License

MIT License