Daily Papers

Researchers often summarize their work in the form of posters. Posters provide a coherent and efficient way to convey core ideas from scientific papers. Generating a good scientific poster, however, is a complex and time consuming cognitive task, since such posters need to be readable, informative, and visually aesthetic. In this paper, for the first time, we study the challenging problem of learning to generate posters from scientific papers. To this end, a data-driven framework, that utilizes graphical models, is proposed. Specifically, given content to display, the key elements of a good poster, including panel layout and attributes of each panel, are learned and inferred from data. Then, given inferred layout and attributes, composition of graphical elements within each panel is synthesized. To learn and validate our model, we collect and make public a Poster-Paper dataset, which consists of scientific papers and corresponding posters with exhaustively labelled panels and attributes. Qualitative and quantitative results indicate the effectiveness of our approach.

Academic poster generation is a crucial yet challenging task in scientific communication, requiring the compression of long-context interleaved documents into a single, visually coherent page. To address this challenge, we introduce the first benchmark and metric suite for poster generation, which pairs recent conference papers with author-designed posters and evaluates outputs on (i)Visual Quality-semantic alignment with human posters, (ii)Textual Coherence-language fluency, (iii)Holistic Assessment-six fine-grained aesthetic and informational criteria scored by a VLM-as-judge, and notably (iv)PaperQuiz-the poster's ability to convey core paper content as measured by VLMs answering generated quizzes. Building on this benchmark, we propose PosterAgent, a top-down, visual-in-the-loop multi-agent pipeline: the (a)Parser distills the paper into a structured asset library; the (b)Planner aligns text-visual pairs into a binary-tree layout that preserves reading order and spatial balance; and the (c)Painter-Commenter loop refines each panel by executing rendering code and using VLM feedback to eliminate overflow and ensure alignment. In our comprehensive evaluation, we find that GPT-4o outputs-though visually appealing at first glance-often exhibit noisy text and poor PaperQuiz scores, and we find that reader engagement is the primary aesthetic bottleneck, as human-designed posters rely largely on visual semantics to convey meaning. Our fully open-source variants (e.g. based on the Qwen-2.5 series) outperform existing 4o-driven multi-agent systems across nearly all metrics, while using 87% fewer tokens. It transforms a 22-page paper into a finalized yet editable .pptx poster - all for just $0.005. These findings chart clear directions for the next generation of fully automated poster-generation models. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Paper2Poster/Paper2Poster.

Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.

Creating layouts is a fundamental step in graphic design. In this work, we propose to use text as the guidance to create graphic layouts, i.e., Text-to-Layout, aiming to lower the design barriers. Text-to-Layout is a challenging task, because it needs to consider the implicit, combined, and incomplete layout constraints from text, each of which has not been studied in previous work. To address this, we present a two-stage approach, named parse-then-place. The approach introduces an intermediate representation (IR) between text and layout to represent diverse layout constraints. With IR, Text-to-Layout is decomposed into a parse stage and a place stage. The parse stage takes a textual description as input and generates an IR, in which the implicit constraints from the text are transformed into explicit ones. The place stage generates layouts based on the IR. To model combined and incomplete constraints, we use a Transformer-based layout generation model and carefully design a way to represent constraints and layouts as sequences. Besides, we adopt the pretrain-then-finetune strategy to boost the performance of the layout generation model with large-scale unlabeled layouts. To evaluate our approach, we construct two Text-to-Layout datasets and conduct experiments on them. Quantitative results, qualitative analysis, and user studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Layout design is an important task in various design fields, including user interface, document, and graphic design. As this task requires tedious manual effort by designers, prior works have attempted to automate this process using generative models, but commonly fell short of providing intuitive user controls and achieving design objectives. In this paper, we build a conditional latent diffusion model, PLay, that generates parametrically conditioned layouts in vector graphic space from user-specified guidelines, which are commonly used by designers for representing their design intents in current practices. Our method outperforms prior works across three datasets on metrics including FID and FD-VG, and in user study. Moreover, it brings a novel and interactive experience to professional layout design processes.

Layout generation is the foundation task of intelligent design, which requires the integration of visual aesthetics and harmonious expression of content delivery. However, existing methods still face challenges in generating precise and visually appealing layouts, including blocking, overlap, or spatial misalignment between layouts, which are closely related to the spatial structure of graphic layouts. We find that these methods overly focus on content information and lack constraints on layout spatial structure, resulting in an imbalance of learning content-aware and graphic-aware features. To tackle this issue, we propose Content and Graphic Balance Layout Generation with Transformer-based Diffusion Model (CGB-DM). Specifically, we first design a regulator that balances the predicted content and graphic weight, overcoming the tendency of paying more attention to the content on canvas. Secondly, we introduce a graphic constraint of saliency bounding box to further enhance the alignment of geometric features between layout representations and images. In addition, we adapt a transformer-based diffusion model as the backbone, whose powerful generation capability ensures the quality in layout generation. Extensive experimental results indicate that our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our model framework can also be expanded to other graphic design fields.

Content-aware visual-textual presentation layout aims at arranging spatial space on the given canvas for pre-defined elements, including text, logo, and underlay, which is a key to automatic template-free creative graphic design. In practical applications, e.g., poster designs, the canvas is originally non-empty, and both inter-element relationships as well as inter-layer relationships should be concerned when generating a proper layout. A few recent works deal with them simultaneously, but they still suffer from poor graphic performance, such as a lack of layout variety or spatial non-alignment. Since content-aware visual-textual presentation layout is a novel task, we first construct a new dataset named PosterLayout, which consists of 9,974 poster-layout pairs and 905 images, i.e., non-empty canvases. It is more challenging and useful for greater layout variety, domain diversity, and content diversity. Then, we propose design sequence formation (DSF) that reorganizes elements in layouts to imitate the design processes of human designers, and a novel CNN-LSTM-based conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) is presented to generate proper layouts. Specifically, the discriminator is design-sequence-aware and will supervise the "design" process of the generator. Experimental results verify the usefulness of the new benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which achieves the best performance by generating suitable layouts for diverse canvases.

Visual layout plays a critical role in graphic design fields such as advertising, posters, and web UI design. The recent trend towards content-aware layout generation through generative models has shown promise, yet it often overlooks the semantic intricacies of layout design by treating it as a simple numerical optimization. To bridge this gap, we introduce PosterLlama, a network designed for generating visually and textually coherent layouts by reformatting layout elements into HTML code and leveraging the rich design knowledge embedded within language models. Furthermore, we enhance the robustness of our model with a unique depth-based poster augmentation strategy. This ensures our generated layouts remain semantically rich but also visually appealing, even with limited data. Our extensive evaluations across several benchmarks demonstrate that PosterLlama outperforms existing methods in producing authentic and content-aware layouts. It supports an unparalleled range of conditions, including but not limited to unconditional layout generation, element conditional layout generation, layout completion, among others, serving as a highly versatile user manipulation tool.

It is common in graphic design humans visually arrange various elements according to their design intent and semantics. For example, a title text almost always appears on top of other elements in a document. In this work, we generate graphic layouts that can flexibly incorporate such design semantics, either specified implicitly or explicitly by a user. We optimize using the latent space of an off-the-shelf layout generation model, allowing our approach to be complementary to and used with existing layout generation models. Our approach builds on a generative layout model based on a Transformer architecture, and formulates the layout generation as a constrained optimization problem where design constraints are used for element alignment, overlap avoidance, or any other user-specified relationship. We show in the experiments that our approach is capable of generating realistic layouts in both constrained and unconstrained generation tasks with a single model. The code is available at https://github.com/ktrk115/const_layout .

Graphic layout designs play an essential role in visual communication. Yet handcrafting layout designs is skill-demanding, time-consuming, and non-scalable to batch production. Generative models emerge to make design automation scalable but it remains non-trivial to produce designs that comply with designers' multimodal desires, i.e., constrained by background images and driven by foreground content. We propose LayoutDETR that inherits the high quality and realism from generative modeling, while reformulating content-aware requirements as a detection problem: we learn to detect in a background image the reasonable locations, scales, and spatial relations for multimodal foreground elements in a layout. Our solution sets a new state-of-the-art performance for layout generation on public benchmarks and on our newly-curated ad banner dataset. We integrate our solution into a graphical system that facilitates user studies, and show that users prefer our designs over baselines by significant margins. Our code, models, dataset, graphical system, and demos are available at https://github.com/salesforce/LayoutDETR.

Spatial control is a core capability in controllable image generation. Advancements in layout-guided image generation have shown promising results on in-distribution (ID) datasets with similar spatial configurations. However, it is unclear how these models perform when facing out-of-distribution (OOD) samples with arbitrary, unseen layouts. In this paper, we propose LayoutBench, a diagnostic benchmark for layout-guided image generation that examines four categories of spatial control skills: number, position, size, and shape. We benchmark two recent representative layout-guided image generation methods and observe that the good ID layout control may not generalize well to arbitrary layouts in the wild (e.g., objects at the boundary). Next, we propose IterInpaint, a new baseline that generates foreground and background regions in a step-by-step manner via inpainting, demonstrating stronger generalizability than existing models on OOD layouts in LayoutBench. We perform quantitative and qualitative evaluation and fine-grained analysis on the four LayoutBench skills to pinpoint the weaknesses of existing models. Lastly, we show comprehensive ablation studies on IterInpaint, including training task ratio, crop&paste vs. repaint, and generation order. Project website: https://layoutbench.github.io

Content-aware layout generation is a critical task in graphic design automation, focused on creating visually appealing arrangements of elements that seamlessly blend with a given background image. The variety of real-world applications makes it highly challenging to develop a single model capable of unifying the diverse range of input-constrained generation sub-tasks, such as those conditioned by element types, sizes, or their relationships. Current methods either address only a subset of these tasks or necessitate separate model parameters for different conditions, failing to offer a truly unified solution. In this paper, we propose UniLayDiff: a Unified Diffusion Transformer, that for the first time, addresses various content-aware layout generation tasks with a single, end-to-end trainable model. Specifically, we treat layout constraints as a distinct modality and employ Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer framework to capture the complex interplay between the background image, layout elements, and diverse constraints. Moreover, we integrate relation constraints through fine-tuning the model with LoRA after pretraining the model on other tasks. Such a schema not only achieves unified conditional generation but also enhances overall layout quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniLayDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance across from unconditional to various conditional generation tasks and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first model to unify the full range of content-aware layout generation tasks.

Graphic layout generation is a growing research area focusing on generating aesthetically pleasing layouts ranging from poster designs to documents. While recent research has explored ways to incorporate user constraints to guide the layout generation, these constraints often require complex specifications which reduce usability. We introduce an innovative approach exploiting user-provided sketches as intuitive constraints and we demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of this new guidance method, establishing the sketch-to-layout problem as a promising research direction, which is currently under-explored. To tackle the sketch-to-layout problem, we propose a multimodal transformer-based solution using the sketch and the content assets as inputs to produce high quality layouts. Since collecting sketch training data from human annotators to train our model is very costly, we introduce a novel and efficient method to synthetically generate training sketches at scale. We train and evaluate our model on three publicly available datasets: PubLayNet, DocLayNet and SlidesVQA, demonstrating that it outperforms state-of-the-art constraint-based methods, while offering a more intuitive design experience. In order to facilitate future sketch-to-layout research, we release O(200k) synthetically-generated sketches for the public datasets above. The datasets are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/sketch_to_layout.

Layout generation is a task to synthesize a harmonious layout with elements characterized by attributes such as category, position, and size. Human designers experiment with the placement and modification of elements to create aesthetic layouts, however, we observed that current discrete diffusion models (DDMs) struggle to correct inharmonious layouts after they have been generated. In this paper, we first provide novel insights into layout sticking phenomenon in DDMs and then propose a simple yet effective layout-assessment module Layout-Corrector, which works in conjunction with existing DDMs to address the layout sticking problem. We present a learning-based module capable of identifying inharmonious elements within layouts, considering overall layout harmony characterized by complex composition. During the generation process, Layout-Corrector evaluates the correctness of each token in the generated layout, reinitializing those with low scores to the ungenerated state. The DDM then uses the high-scored tokens as clues to regenerate the harmonized tokens. Layout-Corrector, tested on common benchmarks, consistently boosts layout-generation performance when in conjunction with various state-of-the-art DDMs. Furthermore, our extensive analysis demonstrates that the Layout-Corrector (1) successfully identifies erroneous tokens, (2) facilitates control over the fidelity-diversity trade-off, and (3) significantly mitigates the performance drop associated with fast sampling.

Attaining a high degree of user controllability in visual generation often requires intricate, fine-grained inputs like layouts. However, such inputs impose a substantial burden on users when compared to simple text inputs. To address the issue, we study how Large Language Models (LLMs) can serve as visual planners by generating layouts from text conditions, and thus collaborate with visual generative models. We propose LayoutGPT, a method to compose in-context visual demonstrations in style sheet language to enhance the visual planning skills of LLMs. LayoutGPT can generate plausible layouts in multiple domains, ranging from 2D images to 3D indoor scenes. LayoutGPT also shows superior performance in converting challenging language concepts like numerical and spatial relations to layout arrangements for faithful text-to-image generation. When combined with a downstream image generation model, LayoutGPT outperforms text-to-image models/systems by 20-40% and achieves comparable performance as human users in designing visual layouts for numerical and spatial correctness. Lastly, LayoutGPT achieves comparable performance to supervised methods in 3D indoor scene synthesis, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential in multiple visual domains.

Generating visual layouts is an essential ingredient of graphic design. The ability to condition layout generation on a partial subset of component attributes is critical to real-world applications that involve user interaction. Recently, diffusion models have demonstrated high-quality generative performances in various domains. However, it is unclear how to apply diffusion models to the natural representation of layouts which consists of a mix of discrete (class) and continuous (location, size) attributes. To address the conditioning layout generation problem, we introduce DLT, a joint discrete-continuous diffusion model. DLT is a transformer-based model which has a flexible conditioning mechanism that allows for conditioning on any given subset of all the layout component classes, locations, and sizes. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art generative models on various layout generation datasets with respect to different metrics and conditioning settings. Additionally, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed conditioning mechanism and the joint continuous-diffusion process. This joint process can be incorporated into a wide range of mixed discrete-continuous generative tasks.

Creating visual layouts is a critical step in graphic design. Automatic generation of such layouts is essential for scalable and diverse visual designs. To advance conditional layout generation, we introduce BLT, a bidirectional layout transformer. BLT differs from previous work on transformers in adopting non-autoregressive transformers. In training, BLT learns to predict the masked attributes by attending to surrounding attributes in two directions. During inference, BLT first generates a draft layout from the input and then iteratively refines it into a high-quality layout by masking out low-confident attributes. The masks generated in both training and inference are controlled by a new hierarchical sampling policy. We verify the proposed model on six benchmarks of diverse design tasks. Experimental results demonstrate two benefits compared to the state-of-the-art layout transformer models. First, our model empowers layout transformers to fulfill controllable layout generation. Second, it achieves up to 10x speedup in generating a layout at inference time than the layout transformer baseline. Code is released at https://shawnkx.github.io/blt.

Conditional graphic layout generation, which automatically maps user constraints to high-quality layouts, has attracted widespread attention today. Although recent works have achieved promising performance, the lack of versatility and data efficiency hinders their practical applications. In this work, we propose LayoutPrompter, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to address the above problems through in-context learning. LayoutPrompter is made up of three key components, namely input-output serialization, dynamic exemplar selection and layout ranking. Specifically, the input-output serialization component meticulously designs the input and output formats for each layout generation task. Dynamic exemplar selection is responsible for selecting the most helpful prompting exemplars for a given input. And a layout ranker is used to pick the highest quality layout from multiple outputs of LLMs. We conduct experiments on all existing layout generation tasks using four public datasets. Despite the simplicity of our approach, experimental results show that LayoutPrompter can compete with or even outperform state-of-the-art approaches on these tasks without any model training or fine-tuning. This demonstrates the effectiveness of this versatile and training-free approach. In addition, the ablation studies show that LayoutPrompter is significantly superior to the training-based baseline in a low-data regime, further indicating the data efficiency of LayoutPrompter. Our project is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LayoutGeneration/tree/main/LayoutPrompter.

We propose a diffusion-based approach for Text-to-Image (T2I) generation with interactive 3D layout control. Layout control has been widely studied to alleviate the shortcomings of T2I diffusion models in understanding objects' placement and relationships from text descriptions. Nevertheless, existing approaches for layout control are limited to 2D layouts, require the user to provide a static layout beforehand, and fail to preserve generated images under layout changes. This makes these approaches unsuitable for applications that require 3D object-wise control and iterative refinements, e.g., interior design and complex scene generation. To this end, we leverage the recent advancements in depth-conditioned T2I models and propose a novel approach for interactive 3D layout control. We replace the traditional 2D boxes used in layout control with 3D boxes. Furthermore, we revamp the T2I task as a multi-stage generation process, where at each stage, the user can insert, change, and move an object in 3D while preserving objects from earlier stages. We achieve this through our proposed Dynamic Self-Attention (DSA) module and the consistent 3D object translation strategy. Experiments show that our approach can generate complicated scenes based on 3D layouts, boosting the object generation success rate over the standard depth-conditioned T2I methods by 2x. Moreover, it outperforms other methods in comparison in preserving objects under layout changes. Project Page: https://abdo-eldesokey.github.io/build-a-scene/

Creating graphic layouts is a fundamental step in graphic designs. In this work, we present a novel generative model named LayoutDiffusion for automatic layout generation. As layout is typically represented as a sequence of discrete tokens, LayoutDiffusion models layout generation as a discrete denoising diffusion process. It learns to reverse a mild forward process, in which layouts become increasingly chaotic with the growth of forward steps and layouts in the neighboring steps do not differ too much. Designing such a mild forward process is however very challenging as layout has both categorical attributes and ordinal attributes. To tackle the challenge, we summarize three critical factors for achieving a mild forward process for the layout, i.e., legality, coordinate proximity and type disruption. Based on the factors, we propose a block-wise transition matrix coupled with a piece-wise linear noise schedule. Experiments on RICO and PubLayNet datasets show that LayoutDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art approaches significantly. Moreover, it enables two conditional layout generation tasks in a plug-and-play manner without re-training and achieves better performance than existing methods.

Layout is important for graphic design and scene generation. We propose a novel Generative Adversarial Network, called LayoutGAN, that synthesizes layouts by modeling geometric relations of different types of 2D elements. The generator of LayoutGAN takes as input a set of randomly-placed 2D graphic elements and uses self-attention modules to refine their labels and geometric parameters jointly to produce a realistic layout. Accurate alignment is critical for good layouts. We thus propose a novel differentiable wireframe rendering layer that maps the generated layout to a wireframe image, upon which a CNN-based discriminator is used to optimize the layouts in image space. We validate the effectiveness of LayoutGAN in various experiments including MNIST digit generation, document layout generation, clipart abstract scene generation and tangram graphic design.

Modeling layout is an important first step for graphic design. Recently, methods for generating graphic layouts have progressed, particularly with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, the problem of specifying the locations and sizes of design elements usually involves constraints with respect to element attributes, such as area, aspect ratio and reading-order. Automating attribute conditional graphic layouts remains a complex and unsolved problem. In this paper, we introduce Attribute-conditioned Layout GAN to incorporate the attributes of design elements for graphic layout generation by forcing both the generator and the discriminator to meet attribute conditions. Due to the complexity of graphic designs, we further propose an element dropout method to make the discriminator look at partial lists of elements and learn their local patterns. In addition, we introduce various loss designs following different design principles for layout optimization. We demonstrate that the proposed method can synthesize graphic layouts conditioned on different element attributes. It can also adjust well-designed layouts to new sizes while retaining elements' original reading-orders. The effectiveness of our method is validated through a user study.

Diffusion models have been recognized for their ability to generate images that are not only visually appealing but also of high artistic quality. As a result, Layout-to-Image (L2I) generation has been proposed to leverage region-specific positions and descriptions to enable more precise and controllable generation. However, previous methods primarily focus on UNet-based models (e.g., SD1.5 and SDXL), and limited effort has explored Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiTs), which have demonstrated powerful image generation capabilities. Enabling MM-DiT for layout-to-image generation seems straightforward but is challenging due to the complexity of how layout is introduced, integrated, and balanced among multiple modalities. To this end, we explore various network variants to efficiently incorporate layout guidance into MM-DiT, and ultimately present SiamLayout. To Inherit the advantages of MM-DiT, we use a separate set of network weights to process the layout, treating it as equally important as the image and text modalities. Meanwhile, to alleviate the competition among modalities, we decouple the image-layout interaction into a siamese branch alongside the image-text one and fuse them in the later stage. Moreover, we contribute a large-scale layout dataset, named LayoutSAM, which includes 2.7 million image-text pairs and 10.7 million entities. Each entity is annotated with a bounding box and a detailed description. We further construct the LayoutSAM-Eval benchmark as a comprehensive tool for evaluating the L2I generation quality. Finally, we introduce the Layout Designer, which taps into the potential of large language models in layout planning, transforming them into experts in layout generation and optimization. Our code, model, and dataset will be available at https://creatilayout.github.io.

Layout generation aims to synthesize realistic graphic scenes consisting of elements with different attributes including category, size, position, and between-element relation. It is a crucial task for reducing the burden on heavy-duty graphic design works for formatted scenes, e.g., publications, documents, and user interfaces (UIs). Diverse application scenarios impose a big challenge in unifying various layout generation subtasks, including conditional and unconditional generation. In this paper, we propose a Layout Diffusion Generative Model (LDGM) to achieve such unification with a single decoupled diffusion model. LDGM views a layout of arbitrary missing or coarse element attributes as an intermediate diffusion status from a completed layout. Since different attributes have their individual semantics and characteristics, we propose to decouple the diffusion processes for them to improve the diversity of training samples and learn the reverse process jointly to exploit global-scope contexts for facilitating generation. As a result, our LDGM can generate layouts either from scratch or conditional on arbitrary available attributes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate our proposed LDGM outperforms existing layout generation models in both functionality and performance.

Automatic furniture layout is long desired for convenient interior design. Leveraging the remarkable visual reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), recent methods address layout generation in a static manner, lacking the feedback-driven refinement essential for interactive user engagement. We introduce Chat2Layout, a novel interactive furniture layout generation system that extends the functionality of MLLMs into the realm of interactive layout design. To achieve this, we establish a unified vision-question paradigm for in-context learning, enabling seamless communication with MLLMs to steer their behavior without altering model weights. Within this framework, we present a novel training-free visual prompting mechanism. This involves a visual-text prompting technique that assist MLLMs in reasoning about plausible layout plans, followed by an Offline-to-Online search (O2O-Search) method, which automatically identifies the minimal set of informative references to provide exemplars for visual-text prompting. By employing an agent system with MLLMs as the core controller, we enable bidirectional interaction. The agent not only comprehends the 3D environment and user requirements through linguistic and visual perception but also plans tasks and reasons about actions to generate and arrange furniture within the virtual space. Furthermore, the agent iteratively updates based on visual feedback from execution results. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach facilitates language-interactive generation and arrangement for diverse and complex 3D furniture.

The layout of a mobile screen is a critical data source for UI design research and semantic understanding of the screen. However, UI layouts in existing datasets are often noisy, have mismatches with their visual representation, or consists of generic or app-specific types that are difficult to analyze and model. In this paper, we propose the CLAY pipeline that uses a deep learning approach for denoising UI layouts, allowing us to automatically improve existing mobile UI layout datasets at scale. Our pipeline takes both the screenshot and the raw UI layout, and annotates the raw layout by removing incorrect nodes and assigning a semantically meaningful type to each node. To experiment with our data-cleaning pipeline, we create the CLAY dataset of 59,555 human-annotated screen layouts, based on screenshots and raw layouts from Rico, a public mobile UI corpus. Our deep models achieve high accuracy with F1 scores of 82.7% for detecting layout objects that do not have a valid visual representation and 85.9% for recognizing object types, which significantly outperforms a heuristic baseline. Our work lays a foundation for creating large-scale high quality UI layout datasets for data-driven mobile UI research and reduces the need of manual labeling efforts that are prohibitively expensive.

Controllable layout generation aims at synthesizing plausible arrangement of element bounding boxes with optional constraints, such as type or position of a specific element. In this work, we try to solve a broad range of layout generation tasks in a single model that is based on discrete state-space diffusion models. Our model, named LayoutDM, naturally handles the structured layout data in the discrete representation and learns to progressively infer a noiseless layout from the initial input, where we model the layout corruption process by modality-wise discrete diffusion. For conditional generation, we propose to inject layout constraints in the form of masking or logit adjustment during inference. We show in the experiments that our LayoutDM successfully generates high-quality layouts and outperforms both task-specific and task-agnostic baselines on several layout tasks.

Multipanel images, commonly seen as web screenshots, posters, etc., pervade our daily lives. These images, characterized by their composition of multiple subfigures in distinct layouts, effectively convey information to people. Toward building advanced multimodal AI applications, such as agents that understand complex scenes and navigate through webpages, the skill of multipanel visual reasoning is essential, and a comprehensive evaluation of models in this regard is important. Therefore, our paper introduces Multipanel Visual Question Answering (MultipanelVQA), a novel benchmark that specifically challenges models in comprehending multipanel images. The benchmark comprises 6,600 questions and answers related to multipanel images. While these questions are straightforward for average humans, achieving nearly perfect correctness, they pose significant challenges to the state-of-the-art Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) we tested. In our study, we utilized synthetically curated multipanel images specifically designed to isolate and evaluate the impact of diverse factors on model performance, revealing the sensitivity of LVLMs to various interferences in multipanel images, such as adjacent subfigures and layout complexity. As a result, MultipanelVQA highlights the need and direction for improving LVLMs' ability to understand complex visual-language contexts. Code and data are released at https://sites.google.com/view/multipanelvqa/home.

Content-aware graphic layout generation aims to automatically arrange visual elements along with a given content, such as an e-commerce product image. In this paper, we argue that the current layout generation approaches suffer from the limited training data for the high-dimensional layout structure. We show that a simple retrieval augmentation can significantly improve the generation quality. Our model, which is named Retrieval-Augmented Layout Transformer (RALF), retrieves nearest neighbor layout examples based on an input image and feeds these results into an autoregressive generator. Our model can apply retrieval augmentation to various controllable generation tasks and yield high-quality layouts within a unified architecture. Our extensive experiments show that RALF successfully generates content-aware layouts in both constrained and unconstrained settings and significantly outperforms the baselines.

Comprehending natural language instructions is a charming property for both 2D and 3D layout synthesis systems. Existing methods implicitly model object joint distributions and express object relations, hindering generation's controllability. We introduce InstructLayout, a novel generative framework that integrates a semantic graph prior and a layout decoder to improve controllability and fidelity for 2D and 3D layout synthesis. The proposed semantic graph prior learns layout appearances and object distributions simultaneously, demonstrating versatility across various downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. To facilitate the benchmarking for text-driven 2D and 3D scene synthesis, we respectively curate two high-quality datasets of layout-instruction pairs from public Internet resources with large language and multimodal models. Extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin in both 2D and 3D layout synthesis tasks. Thorough ablation studies confirm the efficacy of crucial design components.

Generative models able to synthesize layouts of different kinds (e.g. documents, user interfaces or furniture arrangements) are a useful tool to aid design processes and as a first step in the generation of synthetic data, among other tasks. We exploit the properties of self-attention layers to capture high level relationships between elements in a layout, and use these as the building blocks of the well-known Variational Autoencoder (VAE) formulation. Our proposed Variational Transformer Network (VTN) is capable of learning margins, alignments and other global design rules without explicit supervision. Layouts sampled from our model have a high degree of resemblance to the training data, while demonstrating appealing diversity. In an extensive evaluation on publicly available benchmarks for different layout types VTNs achieve state-of-the-art diversity and perceptual quality. Additionally, we show the capabilities of this method as part of a document layout detection pipeline.

Building on the success of diffusion models, significant advancements have been made in multimodal image generation tasks. Among these, human image generation has emerged as a promising technique, offering the potential to revolutionize the fashion design process. However, existing methods often focus solely on text-to-image or image reference-based human generation, which fails to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated demands. To address the limitations of flexibility and precision in human generation, we introduce ComposeAnyone, a controllable layout-to-human generation method with decoupled multimodal conditions. Specifically, our method allows decoupled control of any part in hand-drawn human layouts using text or reference images, seamlessly integrating them during the generation process. The hand-drawn layout, which utilizes color-blocked geometric shapes such as ellipses and rectangles, can be easily drawn, offering a more flexible and accessible way to define spatial layouts. Additionally, we introduce the ComposeHuman dataset, which provides decoupled text and reference image annotations for different components of each human image, enabling broader applications in human image generation tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that ComposeAnyone generates human images with better alignment to given layouts, text descriptions, and reference images, showcasing its multi-task capability and controllability.

Realistic 3D indoor scene synthesis is vital for embodied AI and digital content creation. It can be naturally divided into two subtasks: object generation and layout generation. While recent generative models have significantly advanced object-level quality and controllability, layout generation remains challenging due to limited datasets. Existing methods either overfit to these datasets or rely on predefined constraints to optimize numerical layout that sacrifice flexibility. As a result, they fail to generate scenes that are both open-vocabulary and aligned with fine-grained user instructions. We introduce DirectLayout, a framework that directly generates numerical 3D layouts from text descriptions using generalizable spatial reasoning of large language models (LLMs). DirectLayout decomposes the generation into three stages: producing a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) layout, lifting it into 3D space, and refining object placements. To enable explicit spatial reasoning and help the model grasp basic principles of object placement, we employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Activation based on the 3D-Front dataset. Additionally, we design CoT-Grounded Generative Layout Reward to enhance generalization and spatial planning. During inference, DirectLayout addresses asset-layout mismatches via Iterative Asset-Layout Alignment through in-context learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DirectLayout achieves impressive semantic consistency, generalization and physical plausibility.

Story visualization aims to generate a series of images that match the story described in texts, and it requires the generated images to satisfy high quality, alignment with the text description, and consistency in character identities. Given the complexity of story visualization, existing methods drastically simplify the problem by considering only a few specific characters and scenarios, or requiring the users to provide per-image control conditions such as sketches. However, these simplifications render these methods incompetent for real applications. To this end, we propose an automated story visualization system that can effectively generate diverse, high-quality, and consistent sets of story images, with minimal human interactions. Specifically, we utilize the comprehension and planning capabilities of large language models for layout planning, and then leverage large-scale text-to-image models to generate sophisticated story images based on the layout. We empirically find that sparse control conditions, such as bounding boxes, are suitable for layout planning, while dense control conditions, e.g., sketches and keypoints, are suitable for generating high-quality image content. To obtain the best of both worlds, we devise a dense condition generation module to transform simple bounding box layouts into sketch or keypoint control conditions for final image generation, which not only improves the image quality but also allows easy and intuitive user interactions. In addition, we propose a simple yet effective method to generate multi-view consistent character images, eliminating the reliance on human labor to collect or draw character images.

In text-driven 3D scene generation, object layout serves as a crucial intermediate representation that bridges high-level language instructions with detailed geometric output. It not only provides a structural blueprint for ensuring physical plausibility but also supports semantic controllability and interactive editing. However, the learning capabilities of current 3D indoor layout generation models are constrained by the limited scale, diversity, and annotation quality of existing datasets. To address this, we introduce M3DLayout, a large-scale, multi-source dataset for 3D indoor layout generation. M3DLayout comprises 15,080 layouts and over 258k object instances, integrating three distinct sources: real-world scans, professional CAD designs, and procedurally generated scenes. Each layout is paired with detailed structured text describing global scene summaries, relational placements of large furniture, and fine-grained arrangements of smaller items. This diverse and richly annotated resource enables models to learn complex spatial and semantic patterns across a wide variety of indoor environments. To assess the potential of M3DLayout, we establish a benchmark using a text-conditioned diffusion model. Experimental results demonstrate that our dataset provides a solid foundation for training layout generation models. Its multi-source composition enhances diversity, notably through the Inf3DLayout subset which provides rich small-object information, enabling the generation of more complex and detailed scenes. We hope that M3DLayout can serve as a valuable resource for advancing research in text-driven 3D scene synthesis.

Finding a suitable layout represents a crucial task for diverse applications in graphic design. Motivated by simpler and smoother sampling trajectories, we explore the use of Flow Matching as an alternative to current diffusion-based layout generation models. Specifically, we propose LayoutFlow, an efficient flow-based model capable of generating high-quality layouts. Instead of progressively denoising the elements of a noisy layout, our method learns to gradually move, or flow, the elements of an initial sample until it reaches its final prediction. In addition, we employ a conditioning scheme that allows us to handle various generation tasks with varying degrees of conditioning with a single model. Empirically, LayoutFlow performs on par with state-of-the-art models while being significantly faster.

Graphic design is essential for visual communication with layouts being fundamental to composing attractive designs. Layout generation differs from pixel-level image synthesis and is unique in terms of the requirement of mutual relations among the desired components. We propose a method for design layout generation that can satisfy user-specified constraints. The proposed neural design network (NDN) consists of three modules. The first module predicts a graph with complete relations from a graph with user-specified relations. The second module generates a layout from the predicted graph. Finally, the third module fine-tunes the predicted layout. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the generated layouts are visually similar to real design layouts. We also construct real designs based on predicted layouts for a better understanding of the visual quality. Finally, we demonstrate a practical application on layout recommendation.

Recent approaches for predicting layouts from 360 panoramas produce excellent results. These approaches build on a common framework consisting of three steps: a pre-processing step based on edge-based alignment, prediction of layout elements, and a post-processing step by fitting a 3D layout to the layout elements. Until now, it has been difficult to compare the methods due to multiple different design decisions, such as the encoding network (e.g. SegNet or ResNet), type of elements predicted (e.g. corners, wall/floor boundaries, or semantic segmentation), or method of fitting the 3D layout. To address this challenge, we summarize and describe the common framework, the variants, and the impact of the design decisions. For a complete evaluation, we also propose extended annotations for the Matterport3D dataset [3], and introduce two depth-based evaluation metrics.

Current story visualization methods tend to position subjects solely by text and face challenges in maintaining artistic consistency. To address these limitations, we introduce DreamingComics, a layout-aware story visualization framework. We build upon a pretrained video diffusion-transformer (DiT) model, leveraging its spatiotemporal priors to enhance identity and style consistency. For layout-based position control, we propose RegionalRoPE, a region-aware positional encoding scheme that re-indexes embeddings based on the target layout. Additionally, we introduce a masked condition loss to further constrain each subject's visual features to their designated region. To infer layouts from natural language scripts, we integrate an LLM-based layout generator trained to produce comic-style layouts, enabling flexible and controllable layout conditioning. We present a comprehensive evaluation of our approach, showing a 29.2% increase in character consistency and a 36.2% increase in style similarity compared to previous methods, while displaying high spatial accuracy. Our project page is available at https://yj7082126.github.io/dreamingcomics/

Existing text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models usually struggle in interpreting complex prompts, especially those with quantity, object-attribute binding, and multi-subject descriptions. In this work, we introduce a semantic panel as the middleware in decoding texts to images, supporting the generator to better follow instructions. The panel is obtained through arranging the visual concepts parsed from the input text by the aid of large language models, and then injected into the denoising network as a detailed control signal to complement the text condition. To facilitate text-to-panel learning, we come up with a carefully designed semantic formatting protocol, accompanied by a fully-automatic data preparation pipeline. Thanks to such a design, our approach, which we call Ranni, manages to enhance a pre-trained T2I generator regarding its textual controllability. More importantly, the introduction of the generative middleware brings a more convenient form of interaction (i.e., directly adjusting the elements in the panel or using language instructions) and further allows users to finely customize their generation, based on which we develop a practical system and showcase its potential in continuous generation and chatting-based editing. Our project page is at https://ranni-t2i.github.io/Ranni.

We introduce 3D-FRONT (3D Furnished Rooms with layOuts and semaNTics), a new, large-scale, and comprehensive repository of synthetic indoor scenes highlighted by professionally designed layouts and a large number of rooms populated by high-quality textured 3D models with style compatibility. From layout semantics down to texture details of individual objects, our dataset is freely available to the academic community and beyond. Currently, 3D-FRONT contains 18,968 rooms diversely furnished by 3D objects, far surpassing all publicly available scene datasets. In addition, the 13,151 furniture objects all come with high-quality textures. While the floorplans and layout designs are directly sourced from professional creations, the interior designs in terms of furniture styles, color, and textures have been carefully curated based on a recommender system we develop to attain consistent styles as expert designs. Furthermore, we release Trescope, a light-weight rendering tool, to support benchmark rendering of 2D images and annotations from 3D-FRONT. We demonstrate two applications, interior scene synthesis and texture synthesis, that are especially tailored to the strengths of our new dataset. The project page is at: https://tianchi.aliyun.com/specials/promotion/alibaba-3d-scene-dataset.

Designing 3D indoor layouts is a crucial task with significant applications in virtual reality, interior design, and automated space planning. Existing methods for 3D layout design either rely on diffusion models, which utilize spatial relationship priors, or heavily leverage the inferential capabilities of proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs), which require extensive prompt engineering and in-context exemplars via black-box trials. These methods often face limitations in generalization and dynamic scene editing. In this paper, we introduce LLplace, a novel 3D indoor scene layout designer based on lightweight fine-tuned open-source LLM Llama3. LLplace circumvents the need for spatial relationship priors and in-context exemplars, enabling efficient and credible room layout generation based solely on user inputs specifying the room type and desired objects. We curated a new dialogue dataset based on the 3D-Front dataset, expanding the original data volume and incorporating dialogue data for adding and removing objects. This dataset can enhance the LLM's spatial understanding. Furthermore, through dialogue, LLplace activates the LLM's capability to understand 3D layouts and perform dynamic scene editing, enabling the addition and removal of objects. Our approach demonstrates that LLplace can effectively generate and edit 3D indoor layouts interactively and outperform existing methods in delivering high-quality 3D design solutions. Code and dataset will be released.

In this paper, we propose a method for generating layouts for image-based advertisements by leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM). Conventional advertisement layout techniques have predominantly relied on saliency mapping to detect salient regions within a background image, but such approaches often fail to fully account for the image's detailed composition and semantic content. To overcome this limitation, our method harnesses a VLM to recognize the products and other elements depicted in the background and to inform the placement of text and logos. The proposed layout-generation pipeline consists of two steps. In the first step, the VLM analyzes the image to identify object types and their spatial relationships, then produces a text-based "placement plan" based on this analysis. In the second step, that plan is rendered into the final layout by generating HTML-format code. We validated the effectiveness of our approach through evaluation experiments, conducting both quantitative and qualitative comparisons against existing methods. The results demonstrate that by explicitly considering the background image's content, our method produces noticeably higher-quality advertisement layouts.

Graphic layout generation, a growing research field, plays a significant role in user engagement and information perception. Existing methods primarily treat layout generation as a numerical optimization task, focusing on quantitative aspects while overlooking the semantic information of layout, such as the relationship between each layout element. In this paper, we propose LayoutNUWA, the first model that treats layout generation as a code generation task to enhance semantic information and harness the hidden layout expertise of large language models~(LLMs). More concretely, we develop a Code Instruct Tuning (CIT) approach comprising three interconnected modules: 1) the Code Initialization (CI) module quantifies the numerical conditions and initializes them as HTML code with strategically placed masks; 2) the Code Completion (CC) module employs the formatting knowledge of LLMs to fill in the masked portions within the HTML code; 3) the Code Rendering (CR) module transforms the completed code into the final layout output, ensuring a highly interpretable and transparent layout generation procedure that directly maps code to a visualized layout. We attain significant state-of-the-art performance (even over 50\% improvements) on multiple datasets, showcasing the strong capabilities of LayoutNUWA. Our code is available at https://github.com/ProjectNUWA/LayoutNUWA.