Abstract
Multi-modal creative writing (MMCW) aims to produce illustrated articles. Unlike common multi-modal generative (MMG) tasks such as storytelling or caption generation, MMCW is an entirely new and more abstract challenge where textual and visual contexts are not strictly related to each other. Existing methods for related tasks can be forcibly migrated to this track, but they require specific modality inputs or costly training, and often suffer from semantic inconsistencies between modalities. Therefore, the main challenge lies in economically performing MMCW with flexible interactive patterns, where the semantics between the modalities of the output are more aligned. In this work, we propose FlexMUSE with a T2I module to enable optional visual input. FlexMUSE promotes creativity and emphasizes the unification between modalities by proposing the modality semantic alignment gating (msaGate) to restrict the textual input. Besides, an attention-based cross-modality fusion is proposed to aug