Daily Papers

Graphic layouts serve as an important and engaging medium for visual communication across different channels. While recent layout generation models have demonstrated impressive capabilities, they frequently fail to align with nuanced human aesthetic judgment. Existing preference datasets and reward models trained on text-to-image generation do not generalize to layout evaluation, where the spatial arrangement of identical elements determines quality. To address this critical gap, we introduce DesignSense-10k, a large-scale dataset of 10,235 human-annotated preference pairs for graphic layout evaluation. We propose a five-stage curation pipeline that generates visually coherent layout transformations across diverse aspect ratios, using semantic grouping, layout prediction, filtering, clustering, and VLM-based refinement to produce high-quality comparison pairs. Human preferences are annotated using a 4-class scheme (left, right, both good, both bad) to capture subjective ambiguity. Leveraging this dataset, we train DesignSense, a vision-language model-based classifier that substantially outperforms existing open-source and proprietary models across comprehensive evaluation metrics (54.6% improvement in Macro F1 over the strongest proprietary baseline). Our analysis shows that frontier VLMs remain unreliable overall and fail catastrophically on the full four-class task, underscoring the need for specialized, preference-aware models. Beyond the dataset, our reward model DesignSense yields tangible downstream gains in layout generation. Using our judge during RL based training improves generator win rate by about 3%, while inference-time scaling, which involves generating multiple candidates and selecting the best one, provides a 3.6% improvement. These results highlight the practical impact of specialized, layout-aware preference modeling on real-world layout generation quality.

Document Layout analysis (DLA), is the process by which a page is parsed into meaningful elements, often using machine learning models. Typically, the quality of a model is judged using general object detection metrics such as IoU, F1 or mAP. However, these metrics are designed for images that are 2D projections of 3D space, not for the natively 2D imagery of printed media. This discrepancy can result in misleading or uninformative interpretation of model performance by the metrics. To encourage more robust, comparable, and nuanced DLA, we introduce: The Structural Semantic Unit (SSU) a relational labelling approach that shifts the focus from the physical to the semantic structure of the content; and the Coverage, Overlap, Trespass, and Excess (COTe) score, a decomposable metric for measuring page parsing quality. We demonstrate the value of these methods through case studies and by evaluating 5 common DLA models on 3 DLA datasets. We show that the COTe score is more informative than traditional metrics and reveals distinct failure modes across models, such as breaching semantic boundaries or repeatedly parsing the same region. In addition, the COTe score reduces the interpretation-performance gap by up to 76% relative to the F1. Notably, we find that the COTe's granularity robustness largely holds even without explicit SSU labelling, lowering the barriers to entry for using the system. Finally, we release an SSU labelled dataset and a Python library for applying COTe in DLA projects.

PowerPoint presentations combine rich textual content with structured visual layouts, making them a natural testbed for evaluating the multimodal reasoning and layout understanding abilities of modern MLLMs. However, existing benchmarks focus solely on narrow subtasks while overlooking layout-centric challenges, which are central to real-world slide creation and editing. To bridge this gap, we introduce PPTBench, a comprehensive multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs on PowerPoint-related tasks. Leveraging a diverse source of 958 PPTX files, PPTBench evaluates models across four categories with 4,439 samples, including Detection, Understanding, Modification, and Generation. Our experiments reveal a substantial gap between semantic understanding and visual-layout reasoning in current MLLMs: models can interpret slide content but fail to produce coherent spatial arrangements. Ablation and further analysis show that current MLLMs struggle to combine visual cues with JSON-based layout structures and fail to integrate visual information into their API planning ability. And case studies visually expose systematic layout errors such as misalignment and element overlap. These findings provides a new perspective on evaluating VLLMs in PPT scenarios, highlighting challenges and directions for future research on visual-structural reasoning and coherent slide generation. All datasets and code are fully released to support reproducibility and future research.

Recent advancements in generative models have significantly enhanced their capacity for image generation, enabling a wide range of applications such as image editing, completion and video editing. A specialized area within generative modeling is layout-to-image (L2I) generation, where predefined layouts of objects guide the generative process. In this study, we introduce a novel regional cross-attention module tailored to enrich layout-to-image generation. This module notably improves the representation of layout regions, particularly in scenarios where existing methods struggle with highly complex and detailed textual descriptions. Moreover, while current open-vocabulary L2I methods are trained in an open-set setting, their evaluations often occur in closed-set environments. To bridge this gap, we propose two metrics to assess L2I performance in open-vocabulary scenarios. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive user study to validate the consistency of these metrics with human preferences.

Automated resume information extraction is critical for scaling talent acquisition, yet its real-world deployment faces three major challenges: the extreme heterogeneity of resume layouts and content, the high cost and latency of large language models (LLMs), and the lack of standardized datasets and evaluation tools. In this work, we present a layout-aware and efficiency-optimized framework for automated extraction and evaluation that addresses all three challenges. Our system combines a fine-tuned layout parser to normalize diverse document formats, an inference-efficient LLM extractor based on parallel prompting and instruction tuning, and a robust two-stage automated evaluation framework supported by new benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms strong baselines in both accuracy and efficiency. In particular, we demonstrate that a fine-tuned compact 0.6B LLM achieves top-tier accuracy while significantly reducing inference latency and computational cost. The system is fully deployed in Alibaba's intelligent HR platform, supporting real-time applications across its business units.

In this work, we introduce CC3D, a conditional generative model that synthesizes complex 3D scenes conditioned on 2D semantic scene layouts, trained using single-view images. Different from most existing 3D GANs that limit their applicability to aligned single objects, we focus on generating complex scenes with multiple objects, by modeling the compositional nature of 3D scenes. By devising a 2D layout-based approach for 3D synthesis and implementing a new 3D field representation with a stronger geometric inductive bias, we have created a 3D GAN that is both efficient and of high quality, while allowing for a more controllable generation process. Our evaluations on synthetic 3D-FRONT and real-world KITTI-360 datasets demonstrate that our model generates scenes of improved visual and geometric quality in comparison to previous works.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential in agentic tasks, particularly in slide generation. However, slide generation poses a fundamental challenge: the generation process is text-centric, whereas its quality is governed by visual aesthetics. This modality gap leads current models to frequently produce slides with aesthetically suboptimal layouts. Existing solutions typically rely either on heavy visual reflection, which incurs high inference cost yet yields limited gains; or on fine-tuning with large-scale datasets, which still provides weak and indirect aesthetic supervision. In contrast, the explicit use of aesthetic principles as supervision remains unexplored. In this work, we present AeSlides, a reinforcement learning framework with verifiable rewards for Aesthetic layout supervision in Slide generation. We introduce a suite of meticulously designed verifiable metrics to quantify slide layout quality, capturing key layout issues in an accurate, efficient, and low-cost manner. Leveraging these verifiable metrics, we develop a GRPO-based reinforcement learning method that directly optimizes slide generation models for aesthetically coherent layouts. With only 5K training prompts on GLM-4.7-Flash, AeSlides improves aspect ratio compliance from 36% to 85%, while reducing whitespace by 44%, element collisions by 43%, and visual imbalance by 28%. Human evaluation further shows a substantial improvement in overall quality, increasing scores from 3.31 to 3.56 (+7.6%), outperforming both model-based reward optimization and reflection-based agentic approaches, and even edging out Claude-Sonnet-4.5. These results demonstrate that such a verifiable aesthetic paradigm provides an efficient and scalable approach to aligning slide generation with human aesthetic preferences. Our repository is available at https://github.com/ympan0508/aeslides.

Document digitization is vital for preserving historical records, efficient document management, and advancing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) research. Document Layout Analysis (DLA) involves segmenting documents into meaningful units like text boxes, paragraphs, images, and tables. Challenges arise when dealing with diverse layouts, historical documents, and unique scripts like Bengali, hindered by the lack of comprehensive Bengali DLA datasets. We improved the accuracy of the DLA model for Bengali documents by utilizing advanced Mask R-CNN models available in the Detectron2 library. Our evaluation involved three variants: Mask R-CNN R-50, R-101, and X-101, both with and without pretrained weights from PubLayNet, on the BaDLAD dataset, which contains human-annotated Bengali documents in four categories: text boxes, paragraphs, images, and tables. Results show the effectiveness of these models in accurately segmenting Bengali documents. We discuss speed-accuracy tradeoffs and underscore the significance of pretrained weights. Our findings expand the applicability of Mask R-CNN in document layout analysis, efficient document management, and OCR research while suggesting future avenues for fine-tuning and data augmentation.

Classical OCR pipelines decompose document reading into detection, segmentation, and recognition stages, which makes them sensitive to localization errors and difficult to extend to interactive querying. This work investigates whether a single compact model can jointly perform text recognition and spatial grounding on both handwritten and printed documents. We introduce PILOT, a 155M-parameter prompt-conditioned generative model that formulates document OCR as unified sequence generation. A lightweight depthwise-separable CNN encodes the page, and a Transformer decoder autoregressively emits a single stream of subword and quantized absolute-coordinate tokens on a 10\,px grid, enabling full-page OCR, region-conditioned reading, and query-by-string spotting within the same architecture. A three-stage curriculum, progressing from plain transcription to joint text-and-box generation and finally to prompt-controlled extraction, stabilizes training and improves spatial grounding. Experiments on IAM, RIMES~2009, SROIE~2019, and the heterogeneous MAURDOR benchmark show that PILOT achieves competitive or superior performance in text recognition and line-level detection compared with traditional OCR systems, recent end-to-end HTR models, and compact vision--language models, while remaining substantially smaller than billion-scale multimodal models. Additional evaluations on fine-grained OCR and query-by-string spotting further confirm that a unified text--layout decoder can provide accurate and efficient promptable OCR in a compact setting. To support reproducibility, we release the synthetic SROIE generator, the 500k annotated IDL/PDFA pages, the harmonized line-level annotations for IAM, RIMES~2009, and MAURDOR, and the source code at https://github.com/hamdilaziz/PILOT.

Document parsing from scanned images into structured formats remains a significant challenge due to its complexly intertwined elements such as text paragraphs, figures, formulas, and tables. Existing supervised fine-tuning methods often struggle to generalize across diverse document types, leading to poor performance, particularly on out-of-distribution data. This issue is further exacerbated by the limited availability of high-quality training data for layout-aware parsing tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce LayoutRL, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes layout understanding through composite rewards integrating normalized edit distance, paragraph count accuracy, and reading order preservation. To support this training, we construct the Infinity-Doc-400K dataset, which we use to train Infinity-Parser, a vision-language model demonstrating robust generalization across various domains. Extensive evaluations on benchmarks including OmniDocBench, olmOCR-Bench, PubTabNet, and FinTabNet show that Infinity-Parser consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across a broad range of document types, languages, and structural complexities, substantially outperforming both specialized document parsing systems and general-purpose vision-language models. We will release our code, dataset, and model to facilitate reproducible research in document parsing.

Diffusion models have recently gained recognition for generating diverse and high-quality content, especially in the domain of image synthesis. These models excel not only in creating fixed-size images but also in producing panoramic images. However, existing methods often struggle with spatial layout consistency when producing high-resolution panoramas, due to the lack of guidance of the global image layout. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Scale Diffusion (MSD) framework, a plug-and-play module that extends the existing panoramic image generation framework to multiple resolution levels. By utilizing gradient descent techniques, our method effectively incorporates structural information from low-resolution images into high-resolution outputs. A comprehensive evaluation of the proposed method was conducted, comparing it with the prior works in qualitative and quantitative dimensions. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms others in generating coherent high-resolution panoramas.

Coarse room layout estimation provides important geometric cues for many downstream tasks. Current state-of-the-art methods are predominantly based on single views and often assume panoramic images. We introduce PixCuboid, an optimization-based approach for cuboid-shaped room layout estimation, which is based on multi-view alignment of dense deep features. By training with the optimization end-to-end, we learn feature maps that yield large convergence basins and smooth loss landscapes in the alignment. This allows us to initialize the room layout using simple heuristics. For the evaluation we propose two new benchmarks based on ScanNet++ and 2D-3D-Semantics, with manually verified ground truth 3D cuboids. In thorough experiments we validate our approach and significantly outperform the competition. Finally, while our network is trained with single cuboids, the flexibility of the optimization-based approach allow us to easily extend to multi-room estimation, e.g. larger apartments or offices. Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/ghanning/PixCuboid.

Converting user interfaces into code (UI2Code) is a crucial step in website development, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The automation of UI2Code is essential to streamline this task, beneficial for improving the development efficiency. There exist deep learning-based methods for the task; however, they heavily rely on a large amount of labeled training data and struggle with generalizing to real-world, unseen web page designs. The advent of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) presents potential for alleviating the issue, but they are difficult to comprehend the complex layouts in UIs and generate the accurate code with layout preserved. To address these issues, we propose LayoutCoder, a novel MLLM-based framework generating UI code from real-world webpage images, which includes three key modules: (1) Element Relation Construction, which aims at capturing UI layout by identifying and grouping components with similar structures; (2) UI Layout Parsing, which aims at generating UI layout trees for guiding the subsequent code generation process; and (3) Layout-Guided Code Fusion, which aims at producing the accurate code with layout preserved. For evaluation, we build a new benchmark dataset which involves 350 real-world websites named Snap2Code, divided into seen and unseen parts for mitigating the data leakage issue, besides the popular dataset Design2Code. Extensive evaluation shows the superior performance of LayoutCoder over the state-of-the-art approaches. Compared with the best-performing baseline, LayoutCoder improves 10.14% in the BLEU score and 3.95% in the CLIP score on average across all datasets.

In this paper, we introduce a novel geometry-aware self-training framework for room layout estimation models on unseen scenes with unlabeled data. Our approach utilizes a ray-casting formulation to aggregate multiple estimates from different viewing positions, enabling the computation of reliable pseudo-labels for self-training. In particular, our ray-casting approach enforces multi-view consistency along all ray directions and prioritizes spatial proximity to the camera view for geometry reasoning. As a result, our geometry-aware pseudo-labels effectively handle complex room geometries and occluded walls without relying on assumptions such as Manhattan World or planar room walls. Evaluation on publicly available datasets, including synthetic and real-world scenarios, demonstrates significant improvements in current state-of-the-art layout models without using any human annotation.

Recent breakthroughs in text-to-image diffusion models have significantly advanced the generation of high-fidelity, photo-realistic images from textual descriptions. Yet, these models often struggle with interpreting spatial arrangements from text, hindering their ability to produce images with precise spatial configurations. To bridge this gap, layout-to-image generation has emerged as a promising direction. However, training-based approaches are limited by the need for extensively annotated datasets, leading to high data acquisition costs and a constrained conceptual scope. Conversely, training-free methods face challenges in accurately locating and generating semantically similar objects within complex compositions. This paper introduces a novel training-free approach designed to overcome adversarial semantic intersections during the diffusion conditioning phase. By refining intra-token loss with selective sampling and enhancing the diffusion process with attention redistribution, we propose two innovative constraints: 1) an inter-token constraint that resolves token conflicts to ensure accurate concept synthesis; and 2) a self-attention constraint that improves pixel-to-pixel relationships. Our evaluations confirm the effectiveness of leveraging layout information for guiding the diffusion process, generating content-rich images with enhanced fidelity and complexity. Code is available at https://github.com/Papple-F/csg.git.

Traditional image-to-3D models often struggle with scenes containing multiple objects due to biases and occlusion complexities. To address this challenge, we present REPARO, a novel approach for compositional 3D asset generation from single images. REPARO employs a two-step process: first, it extracts individual objects from the scene and reconstructs their 3D meshes using off-the-shelf image-to-3D models; then, it optimizes the layout of these meshes through differentiable rendering techniques, ensuring coherent scene composition. By integrating optimal transport-based long-range appearance loss term and high-level semantic loss term in the differentiable rendering, REPARO can effectively recover the layout of 3D assets. The proposed method can significantly enhance object independence, detail accuracy, and overall scene coherence. Extensive evaluation of multi-object scenes demonstrates that our REPARO offers a comprehensive approach to address the complexities of multi-object 3D scene generation from single images.

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.

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.

Layout-aware text-to-image generation is a task to generate multi-object images that reflect layout conditions in addition to text conditions. The current layout-aware text-to-image diffusion models still have several issues, including mismatches between the text and layout conditions and quality degradation of generated images. This paper proposes a novel layout-aware text-to-image diffusion model called NoiseCollage to tackle these issues. During the denoising process, NoiseCollage independently estimates noises for individual objects and then crops and merges them into a single noise. This operation helps avoid condition mismatches; in other words, it can put the right objects in the right places. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that NoiseCollage outperforms several state-of-the-art models. These successful results indicate that the crop-and-merge operation of noises is a reasonable strategy to control image generation. We also show that NoiseCollage can be integrated with ControlNet to use edges, sketches, and pose skeletons as additional conditions. Experimental results show that this integration boosts the layout accuracy of ControlNet. The code is available at https://github.com/univ-esuty/noisecollage.

In this paper, we study the graphic layout generation problem of producing high-quality visual-textual presentation designs for given images. We note that image compositions, which contain not only global semantics but also spatial information, would largely affect layout results. Hence, we propose a deep generative model, dubbed as composition-aware graphic layout GAN (CGL-GAN), to synthesize layouts based on the global and spatial visual contents of input images. To obtain training images from images that already contain manually designed graphic layout data, previous work suggests masking design elements (e.g., texts and embellishments) as model inputs, which inevitably leaves hint of the ground truth. We study the misalignment between the training inputs (with hint masks) and test inputs (without masks), and design a novel domain alignment module (DAM) to narrow this gap. For training, we built a large-scale layout dataset which consists of 60,548 advertising posters with annotated layout information. To evaluate the generated layouts, we propose three novel metrics according to aesthetic intuitions. Through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that the proposed model can synthesize high-quality graphic layouts according to image compositions.

Automating the conversion of UI images into web code is a critical task for front-end development and rapid prototyping. Advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made WebUI-to-Code increasingly feasible, yet existing benchmarks remain limited in data diversity and evaluation reliability. To address these issues, we present WebRenderBench, a large-scale benchmark of 22.5k webpages collected from real-world portal sites, offering greater diversity, complexity, and realism than prior benchmarks. We further propose a novel evaluation metric that measures layout and style consistency from the final rendered pages. Unlike vision-based methods that rely on costly LLM reasoning or structure-based comparisons vulnerable to noise and asymmetry, our approach enables more efficient, objective, and reliable UI quality assessment. Finally, we introduce the Automated Layout and Style Inspection Agent (ALISA), which integrates this metric into reinforcement learning as a reward signal to enhance training on crawled asymmetric webpages. Experiments show that ALISA significantly boosts generation performance, achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple metrics.

Layout-guided text-to-image models offer greater control over the generation process by explicitly conditioning image synthesis on the spatial arrangement of elements. As a result, their adoption has increased in many computer vision applications, ranging from content creation to synthetic data generation. A critical challenge is achieving precise alignment between the image, textual prompt, and layout, ensuring semantic fidelity and spatial accuracy. Although recent benchmarks assess text alignment, layout alignment remains overlooked, and no existing benchmark jointly evaluates both. This gap limits the ability to evaluate a model's spatial fidelity, which is crucial when using layout-guided generation for synthetic data, as errors can introduce noise and degrade data quality. In this work, we introduce 7Bench, the first benchmark to assess both semantic and spatial alignment in layout-guided text-to-image generation. It features text-and-layout pairs spanning seven challenging scenarios, investigating object generation, color fidelity, attribute recognition, inter-object relationships, and spatial control. We propose an evaluation protocol that builds on existing frameworks by incorporating the layout alignment score to assess spatial accuracy. Using 7Bench, we evaluate several state-of-the-art diffusion models, uncovering their respective strengths and limitations across diverse alignment tasks. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/Elizzo/7Bench.

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.

Most evaluations of large language models focus on standard tasks such as factual question answering or short summarization. This research expands that scope in two directions: first, by comparing two retrieval strategies, Graph RAG, structured knowledge-graph based, and Advanced RAG, hybrid keyword-semantic search, for QA; and second, by evaluating whether LLMs can generate high quality non-traditional academic outputs, specifically slide decks and podcast scripts. We implemented a prototype combining Meta's LLaMA 3 70B open weight and OpenAI's GPT 4o mini API based. QA performance was evaluated using both human ratings across eleven quality dimensions and large language model judges for scalable cross validation. GPT 4o mini with Advanced RAG produced the most accurate responses. Graph RAG offered limited improvements and led to more hallucinations, partly due to its structural complexity and manual setup. Slide and podcast generation was tested with document grounded retrieval. GPT 4o mini again performed best, though LLaMA 3 showed promise in narrative coherence. Human reviewers were crucial for detecting layout and stylistic flaws, highlighting the need for combined human LLM evaluation in assessing emerging academic outputs.

Recent diffusion models have advanced image editing by enhancing visual quality and control, supporting broad applications across creative and personalized domains. However, current image editing largely overlooks multi-object scenarios, where precise control over object categories, counts, and spatial layouts remains a significant challenge. To address this, we introduce a new task, quantity-and-layout consistent image editing (QL-Edit), which aims to enable fine-grained control of object quantity and spatial structure in complex scenes. We further propose IMAGHarmony, a structure-aware framework that incorporates harmony-aware attention (HA) to integrate multimodal semantics, explicitly modeling object counts and layouts to enhance editing accuracy and structural consistency. In addition, we observe that diffusion models are susceptible to initial noise and exhibit strong preferences for specific noise patterns. Motivated by this, we present a preference-guided noise selection (PNS) strategy that chooses semantically aligned initial noise samples based on vision-language matching, thereby improving generation stability and layout consistency in multi-object editing. To support evaluation, we construct HarmonyBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering diverse quantity and layout control scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IMAGHarmony consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in structural alignment and semantic accuracy. The code and model are available at https://github.com/muzishen/IMAGHarmony.

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

Latent space exploration is a technique that discovers interpretable latent directions and manipulates latent codes to edit various attributes in images generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, in previous work, spatial control is limited to simple transformations (e.g., translation and rotation), and it is laborious to identify appropriate latent directions and adjust their parameters. In this paper, we tackle the problem of editing the StyleGAN image layout by annotating the image directly. To do so, we propose an interactive framework for manipulating latent codes in accordance with the user inputs. In our framework, the user annotates a StyleGAN image with locations they want to move or not and specifies a movement direction by mouse dragging. From these user inputs and initial latent codes, our latent transformer based on a transformer encoder-decoder architecture estimates the output latent codes, which are fed to the StyleGAN generator to obtain a result image. To train our latent transformer, we utilize synthetic data and pseudo-user inputs generated by off-the-shelf StyleGAN and optical flow models, without manual supervision. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over existing methods.

Recently, many studies have demonstrated that exclusively incorporating OCR-derived text and spatial layouts with large language models (LLMs) can be highly effective for document understanding tasks. However, existing methods that integrate spatial layouts with text have limitations, such as producing overly long text sequences or failing to fully leverage the autoregressive traits of LLMs. In this work, we introduce Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model (LayTextLLM)} for document understanding. LayTextLLM projects each bounding box to a single embedding and interleaves it with text, efficiently avoiding long sequence issues while leveraging autoregressive traits of LLMs. LayTextLLM not only streamlines the interaction of layout and textual data but also shows enhanced performance in KIE and VQA. Comprehensive benchmark evaluations reveal significant improvements of LayTextLLM, with a 15.2% increase on KIE tasks and 10.7% on VQA tasks compared to previous SOTA OCR-based LLMs. All resources are available at https://github.com/LayTextLLM/LayTextLLM.

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.

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/

Robust Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is critical for the automated processing and understanding of historical documents with complex page organizations. This paper benchmarks five state-of-the-art object detection architectures on three annotated datasets representing a spectrum of codicological complexity: The e-NDP, a corpus of Parisian medieval registers (1326-1504); CATMuS, a diverse multiclass dataset derived from various medieval and modern sources (ca.12th-17th centuries) and HORAE, a corpus of decorated books of hours (ca.13th-16th centuries). We evaluate two Transformer-based models (Co-DETR, Grounding DINO) against three YOLO variants (AABB, OBB, and YOLO-World). Our findings reveal significant performance variations dependent on model architecture, data set characteristics, and bounding box representation. In the e-NDP dataset, Co-DETR achieves state-of-the-art results (0.752 mAP@.50:.95), closely followed by YOLOv11X-OBB (0.721). Conversely, on the more complex CATMuS and HORAE datasets, the CNN-based YOLOv11x-OBB significantly outperforms all other models (0.564 and 0.568, respectively). This study unequivocally demonstrates that using Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBB) is not a minor refinement but a fundamental requirement for accurately modeling the non-Cartesian nature of historical manuscripts. We conclude that a key trade-off exists between the global context awareness of Transformers, ideal for structured layouts, and the superior generalization of CNN-OBB models for visually diverse and complex documents.

Visual layouts are essential in graphic design fields such as advertising, posters, and web interfaces. The application of generative models for content-aware layout generation has recently gained traction. However, these models fail to understand the contextual aesthetic requirements of layout design and do not align with human-like preferences, primarily treating it as a prediction task without considering the final rendered output. To overcome these problems, we offer Aesthetic-Aware Preference Alignment(AAPA), a novel technique to train a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) for layout prediction that uses MLLM's aesthetic preferences for Direct Preference Optimization over graphic layouts. We propose a data filtering protocol utilizing our layout-quality heuristics for AAPA to ensure training happens on high-quality layouts. Additionally, we introduce a novel evaluation metric that uses another MLLM to compute the win rate of the generated layout against the ground-truth layout based on aesthetics criteria. We also demonstrate the applicability of AAPA for MLLMs of varying scales (1B to 8B parameters) and LLM families (Qwen, Phi, InternLM). By conducting thorough qualitative and quantitative analyses, we verify the efficacy of our approach on two challenging benchmarks - Crello and Webui, showcasing 17%, and 16 improvement over current State-of-The-Art methods, thereby highlighting the potential of MLLMs in aesthetic-aware layout generation.

Current digital human studies focusing on lip-syncing and body movement are no longer sufficient to meet the growing industrial demand, while human video generation techniques that support interacting with real-world environments (e.g., objects) have not been well investigated. Despite human hand synthesis already being an intricate problem, generating objects in contact with hands and their interactions presents an even more challenging task, especially when the objects exhibit obvious variations in size and shape. To tackle these issues, we present a novel video Reenactment framework focusing on Human-Object Interaction (HOI) via an adaptive Layout-instructed Diffusion model (Re-HOLD). Our key insight is to employ specialized layout representation for hands and objects, respectively. Such representations enable effective disentanglement of hand modeling and object adaptation to diverse motion sequences. To further improve the generation quality of HOI, we design an interactive textural enhancement module for both hands and objects by introducing two independent memory banks. We also propose a layout adjustment strategy for the cross-object reenactment scenario to adaptively adjust unreasonable layouts caused by diverse object sizes during inference. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods. Project page: https://fyycs.github.io/Re-HOLD.

Converting webpage designs into code (design-to-code) plays a vital role in User Interface (UI) development for front-end developers, bridging the gap between visual design and functional implementation. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant potential in design-to-code tasks, they often fail to accurately preserve the layout during code generation. To this end, we draw inspiration from the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in human cognition and propose LaTCoder, a novel approach that enhances layout preservation in webpage design during code generation with Layout-as-Thought (LaT). Specifically, we first introduce a simple yet efficient algorithm to divide the webpage design into image blocks. Next, we prompt MLLMs using a CoTbased approach to generate code for each block. Finally, we apply two assembly strategies-absolute positioning and an MLLM-based method-followed by dynamic selection to determine the optimal output. We evaluate the effectiveness of LaTCoder using multiple backbone MLLMs (i.e., DeepSeek-VL2, Gemini, and GPT-4o) on both a public benchmark and a newly introduced, more challenging benchmark (CC-HARD) that features complex layouts. The experimental results on automatic metrics demonstrate significant improvements. Specifically, TreeBLEU scores increased by 66.67% and MAE decreased by 38% when using DeepSeek-VL2, compared to direct prompting. Moreover, the human preference evaluation results indicate that annotators favor the webpages generated by LaTCoder in over 60% of cases, providing strong evidence of the effectiveness of our method.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality images. Recent advancements in Layout-to-Image (L2I) generation have leveraged positional conditions and textual descriptions to facilitate precise and controllable image synthesis. Despite overall progress, current L2I methods still exhibit suboptimal performance. Therefore, we propose InstanceAssemble, a novel architecture that incorporates layout conditions via instance-assembling attention, enabling position control with bounding boxes (bbox) and multimodal content control including texts and additional visual content. Our method achieves flexible adaption to existing DiT-based T2I models through light-weighted LoRA modules. Additionally, we propose a Layout-to-Image benchmark, Denselayout, a comprehensive benchmark for layout-to-image generation, containing 5k images with 90k instances in total. We further introduce Layout Grounding Score (LGS), an interpretable evaluation metric to more precisely assess the accuracy of L2I generation. Experiments demonstrate that our InstanceAssemble method achieves state-of-the-art performance under complex layout conditions, while exhibiting strong compatibility with diverse style LoRA modules.

Multi-modal generative document parsing systems challenge traditional evaluation: unlike deterministic OCR or layout models, they often produce semantically correct yet structurally divergent outputs. Conventional metrics-CER, WER, IoU, or TEDS-misclassify such diversity as error, penalizing valid interpretations and obscuring system behavior. We introduce SCORE (Structural and COntent Robust Evaluation), an interpretation-agnostic framework that integrates (i) adjusted edit distance for robust content fidelity, (ii) token-level diagnostics to distinguish hallucinations from omissions, (iii) table evaluation with spatial tolerance and semantic alignment, and (iv) hierarchy-aware consistency checks. Together, these dimensions enable evaluation that embraces representational diversity while enforcing semantic rigor. Across 1,114 pages spanning a holistic benchmark and a field dataset, SCORE consistently revealed cross-dataset performance patterns missed by standard metrics. In 2-5% of pages with ambiguous table structures, traditional metrics penalized systems by 12-25% on average, leading to distorted rankings. SCORE corrected these cases, recovering equivalence between alternative but valid interpretations. Moreover, by normalizing generative outputs into a format-agnostic representation, SCORE reproduces traditional scores (e.g., table F1 up to 0.93) without requiring object-detection pipelines, demonstrating that generative parsing alone suffices for comprehensive evaluation. By exposing how interpretive diversity impacts evaluation outcomes and providing multi-dimensional, interpretable diagnostics, SCORE establishes foundational principles for semantically grounded, fair, and practical benchmarking of modern document parsing systems.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is widely used to extract text from images of documents, facilitating efficient digitization and data retrieval. However, merely extracting text is insufficient when dealing with complex documents. Fully comprehending such documents requires an understanding of their structure -- including formatting, formulas, tables, and the reading order of multiple blocks and columns across multiple pages -- as well as semantic information for detecting elements like footnotes and image captions. This comprehensive understanding is crucial for downstream tasks such as retrieval, document question answering, and data curation for training Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). To address this, we introduce \'Eclair, a general-purpose text-extraction tool specifically designed to process a wide range of document types. Given an image, \'Eclair is able to extract formatted text in reading order, along with bounding boxes and their corresponding semantic classes. To thoroughly evaluate these novel capabilities, we introduce our diverse human-annotated benchmark for document-level OCR and semantic classification. \'Eclair achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on this benchmark, outperforming other methods across key metrics. Additionally, we evaluate \'Eclair on established benchmarks, demonstrating its versatility and strength across several evaluation standards.

We introduce the WorldScore benchmark, the first unified benchmark for world generation. We decompose world generation into a sequence of next-scene generation tasks with explicit camera trajectory-based layout specifications, enabling unified evaluation of diverse approaches from 3D and 4D scene generation to video generation models. The WorldScore benchmark encompasses a curated dataset of 3,000 test examples that span diverse worlds: static and dynamic, indoor and outdoor, photorealistic and stylized. The WorldScore metrics evaluate generated worlds through three key aspects: controllability, quality, and dynamics. Through extensive evaluation of 19 representative models, including both open-source and closed-source ones, we reveal key insights and challenges for each category of models. Our dataset, evaluation code, and leaderboard can be found at https://haoyi-duan.github.io/WorldScore/

Despite recent advances in text-to-image generation, models still struggle to accurately render prompt-specified text with correct spatial layout -- especially in multi-span, structured settings. This challenge is driven not only by the lack of datasets that align prompts with the exact text and layout expected in the image, but also by the absence of effective metrics for evaluating layout quality. To address these issues, we introduce TextGround4M, a large-scale dataset of over 4 million prompt-image pairs, each annotated with span-level text grounded in the prompt and corresponding bounding boxes. This enables fine-grained supervision for layout-aware, prompt-grounded text rendering. Building on this, we propose a lightweight training strategy for autoregressive T2I models that appends layout-aware span tokens during training, without altering model architecture or inference behavior. We further construct a benchmark with stratified layout complexity to evaluate both open-source and proprietary models in a zero-shot setting. In addition, we introduce two layout-aware metrics to address the long-standing lack of spatial evaluation in text rendering. Our results show that models trained on TextGround4M outperform strong baselines in text fidelity, spatial accuracy, and prompt consistency, highlighting the importance of fine-grained layout supervision for grounded T2I generation.

Document analysis and understanding models often require extensive annotated data to be trained. However, various document-related tasks extend beyond mere text transcription, requiring both textual content and precise bounding-box annotations to identify different document elements. Collecting such data becomes particularly challenging, especially in the context of invoices, where privacy concerns add an additional layer of complexity. In this paper, we introduce FATURA, a pivotal resource for researchers in the field of document analysis and understanding. FATURA is a highly diverse dataset featuring multi-layout, annotated invoice document images. Comprising 10,000 invoices with 50 distinct layouts, it represents the largest openly accessible image dataset of invoice documents known to date. We also provide comprehensive benchmarks for various document analysis and understanding tasks and conduct experiments under diverse training and evaluation scenarios. The dataset is freely accessible at https://zenodo.org/record/8261508, empowering researchers to advance the field of document analysis and understanding.

As large language models have demonstrated impressive performance in many domains, recent works have adopted language models (LMs) as controllers of visual modules for vision-and-language tasks. While existing work focuses on equipping LMs with visual understanding, we propose two novel interpretable/explainable visual programming frameworks for text-to-image (T2I) generation and evaluation. First, we introduce VPGen, an interpretable step-by-step T2I generation framework that decomposes T2I generation into three steps: object/count generation, layout generation, and image generation. We employ an LM to handle the first two steps (object/count generation and layout generation), by finetuning it on text-layout pairs. Our step-by-step T2I generation framework provides stronger spatial control than end-to-end models, the dominant approach for this task. Furthermore, we leverage the world knowledge of pretrained LMs, overcoming the limitation of previous layout-guided T2I works that can only handle predefined object classes. We demonstrate that our VPGen has improved control in counts/spatial relations/scales of objects than state-of-the-art T2I generation models. Second, we introduce VPEval, an interpretable and explainable evaluation framework for T2I generation based on visual programming. Unlike previous T2I evaluations with a single scoring model that is accurate in some skills but unreliable in others, VPEval produces evaluation programs that invoke a set of visual modules that are experts in different skills, and also provides visual+textual explanations of the evaluation results. Our analysis shows VPEval provides a more human-correlated evaluation for skill-specific and open-ended prompts than widely used single model-based evaluation. We hope our work encourages future progress on interpretable/explainable generation and evaluation for T2I models. Website: https://vp-t2i.github.io

Recognizing the layout of unstructured digital documents is an important step when parsing the documents into structured machine-readable format for downstream applications. Deep neural networks that are developed for computer vision have been proven to be an effective method to analyze layout of document images. However, document layout datasets that are currently publicly available are several magnitudes smaller than established computing vision datasets. Models have to be trained by transfer learning from a base model that is pre-trained on a traditional computer vision dataset. In this paper, we develop the PubLayNet dataset for document layout analysis by automatically matching the XML representations and the content of over 1 million PDF articles that are publicly available on PubMed Central. The size of the dataset is comparable to established computer vision datasets, containing over 360 thousand document images, where typical document layout elements are annotated. The experiments demonstrate that deep neural networks trained on PubLayNet accurately recognize the layout of scientific articles. The pre-trained models are also a more effective base mode for transfer learning on a different document domain. We release the dataset (https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/PubLayNet) to support development and evaluation of more advanced models for document layout analysis.

As one of the most promising areas, mobile robots draw much attention these years. Current work in this field is often evaluated in a few manually designed scenarios, due to the lack of a common experimental platform. Meanwhile, with the recent development of deep learning techniques, some researchers attempt to apply learning-based methods to mobile robot tasks, which requires a substantial amount of data. To satisfy the underlying demand, in this paper we build HouseExpo, a large-scale indoor layout dataset containing 35,126 2D floor plans including 252,550 rooms in total. Together we develop Pseudo-SLAM, a lightweight and efficient simulation platform to accelerate the data generation procedure, thereby speeding up the training process. In our experiments, we build models to tackle obstacle avoidance and autonomous exploration from a learning perspective in simulation as well as real-world experiments to verify the effectiveness of our simulator and dataset. All the data and codes are available online and we hope HouseExpo and Pseudo-SLAM can feed the need for data and benefits the whole community.

Document layout analysis usually relies on computer vision models to understand documents while ignoring textual information that is vital to capture. Meanwhile, high quality labeled datasets with both visual and textual information are still insufficient. In this paper, we present DocBank, a benchmark dataset that contains 500K document pages with fine-grained token-level annotations for document layout analysis. DocBank is constructed using a simple yet effective way with weak supervision from the documents available on the arXiv.com. With DocBank, models from different modalities can be compared fairly and multi-modal approaches will be further investigated and boost the performance of document layout analysis. We build several strong baselines and manually split train/dev/test sets for evaluation. Experiment results show that models trained on DocBank accurately recognize the layout information for a variety of documents. The DocBank dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/doc-analysis/DocBank.

We call on the Document AI (DocAI) community to reevaluate current methodologies and embrace the challenge of creating more practically-oriented benchmarks. Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE) seeks to remediate the halted research progress in understanding visually-rich documents (VRDs). We present a new dataset with novelties related to types of questions, answers, and document layouts based on multi-industry, multi-domain, and multi-page VRDs of various origins, and dates. Moreover, we are pushing the boundaries of current methods by creating multi-task and multi-domain evaluation setups that more accurately simulate real-world situations where powerful generalization and adaptation under low-resource settings are desired. DUDE aims to set a new standard as a more practical, long-standing benchmark for the community, and we hope that it will lead to future extensions and contributions that address real-world challenges. Finally, our work illustrates the importance of finding more efficient ways to model language, images, and layout in DocAI.

We introduce SLayR, Scene Layout Generation with Rectified flow. State-of-the-art text-to-image models achieve impressive results. However, they generate images end-to-end, exposing no fine-grained control over the process. SLayR presents a novel transformer-based rectified flow model for layout generation over a token space that can be decoded into bounding boxes and corresponding labels, which can then be transformed into images using existing models. We show that established metrics for generated images are inconclusive for evaluating their underlying scene layout, and introduce a new benchmark suite, including a carefully designed repeatable human-evaluation procedure that assesses the plausibility and variety of generated layouts. In contrast to previous works, which perform well in either high variety or plausibility, we show that our approach performs well on both of these axes at the same time. It is also at least 5x times smaller in the number of parameters and 37% faster than the baselines. Our complete text-to-image pipeline demonstrates the added benefits of an interpretable and editable intermediate representation.

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.

End-to-end In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to convert text embedded within an image into a target language while preserving the original visual context, layout, and rendering style. However, existing IIMT benchmarks are largely synthetic and thus fail to reflect real-world complexity, while current evaluation protocols focus on single-modality metrics and overlook cross-modal faithfulness between rendered text and model outputs. To address these shortcomings, we present In-image Machine Translation Benchmark (IMTBench), a new benchmark of 2,500 image translation samples covering four practical scenarios and nine languages. IMTBench supports multi-aspect evaluation, including translation quality, background preservation, overall image quality, and a cross-modal alignment score that measures consistency between the translated text produced by the model and the text rendered in the translated image. We benchmark strong commercial cascade systems, and both closed- and open-source unified multi-modal models, and observe large performance gaps across scenarios and languages, especially on natural scenes and resource-limited languages, highlighting substantial headroom for end-to-end image text translation. We hope IMTBench establishes a standardized benchmark to accelerate progress in this emerging task.

Text summarization aims at compressing long documents into a shorter form that conveys the most important parts of the original document. Despite increased interest in the community and notable research effort, progress on benchmark datasets has stagnated. We critically evaluate key ingredients of the current research setup: datasets, evaluation metrics, and models, and highlight three primary shortcomings: 1) automatically collected datasets leave the task underconstrained and may contain noise detrimental to training and evaluation, 2) current evaluation protocol is weakly correlated with human judgment and does not account for important characteristics such as factual correctness, 3) models overfit to layout biases of current datasets and offer limited diversity in their outputs.

Before developing a Document Layout Analysis (DLA) model in real-world applications, conducting comprehensive robustness testing is essential. However, the robustness of DLA models remains underexplored in the literature. To address this, we are the first to introduce a robustness benchmark for DLA models, which includes 450K document images of three datasets. To cover realistic corruptions, we propose a perturbation taxonomy with 36 common document perturbations inspired by real-world document processing. Additionally, to better understand document perturbation impacts, we propose two metrics, Mean Perturbation Effect (mPE) for perturbation assessment and Mean Robustness Degradation (mRD) for robustness evaluation. Furthermore, we introduce a self-titled model, i.e., Robust Document Layout Analyzer (RoDLA), which improves attention mechanisms to boost extraction of robust features. Experiments on the proposed benchmarks (PubLayNet-P, DocLayNet-P, and M^6Doc-P) demonstrate that RoDLA obtains state-of-the-art mRD scores of 115.7, 135.4, and 150.4, respectively. Compared to previous methods, RoDLA achieves notable improvements in mAP of +3.8%, +7.1% and +12.1%, respectively.

Given the steep learning curve of professional 3D software and the time-consuming process of managing large 3D assets, language-guided 3D scene editing has significant potential in fields such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and gaming. However, recent approaches to language-guided 3D scene editing either require manual interventions or focus only on appearance modifications without supporting comprehensive scene layout changes. In response, we propose Edit-Room, a unified framework capable of executing a variety of layout edits through natural language commands, without requiring manual intervention. Specifically, EditRoom leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for command planning and generates target scenes using a diffusion-based method, enabling six types of edits: rotate, translate, scale, replace, add, and remove. To address the lack of data for language-guided 3D scene editing, we have developed an automatic pipeline to augment existing 3D scene synthesis datasets and introduced EditRoom-DB, a large-scale dataset with 83k editing pairs, for training and evaluation. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms other baselines across all metrics, indicating higher accuracy and coherence in language-guided scene layout editing.

Text image is a unique and crucial information medium that integrates visual aesthetics and linguistic semantics in modern e-society. Due to their subtlety and complexity, the generation of text images represents a challenging and evolving frontier in the image generation field. The recent surge of specialized image generators (e.g., Flux-series) and unified generative models (e.g., GPT-4o), which demonstrate exceptional fidelity, raises a natural question: can they master the intricacies of text image generation and editing? Motivated by this, we assess current state-of-the-art generative models' capabilities in terms of text image generation and editing. We incorporate various typical optical character recognition (OCR) tasks into our evaluation and broaden the concept of text-based generation tasks into OCR generative tasks. We select 33 representative tasks and categorize them into five categories: document, handwritten text, scene text, artistic text, and complex \& layout-rich text. For comprehensive evaluation, we examine six models across both closed-source and open-source domains, using tailored, high-quality image inputs and prompts. Through this evaluation, we draw crucial observations and identify the weaknesses of current generative models for OCR tasks. We argue that photorealistic text image generation and editing should be internalized as foundational skills into general-domain generative models, rather than being delegated to specialized solutions, and we hope this empirical analysis can provide valuable insights for the community to achieve this goal. This evaluation is online and will be continuously updated at our GitHub repository.

Document AI aims to automatically analyze documents by leveraging natural language processing and computer vision techniques. One of the major tasks of Document AI is document layout analysis, which structures document pages by interpreting the content and spatial relationships of layout, image, and text. This task can be image-centric, wherein the aim is to identify and label various regions such as authors and paragraphs, or text-centric, where the focus is on classifying individual words in a document. Although there are increasingly sophisticated methods for improving layout analysis, doubts remain about the extent to which their findings can be generalized to a broader context. Specifically, prior work developed systems based on very different architectures, such as transformer-based, graph-based, and CNNs. However, no work has mentioned the effectiveness of these models in a comparative analysis. Moreover, while language-independent Document AI models capable of knowledge transfer have been developed, it remains to be investigated to what degree they can effectively transfer knowledge. In this study, we aim to fill these gaps by conducting a comparative evaluation of state-of-the-art models in document layout analysis and investigating the potential of cross-lingual layout analysis by utilizing machine translation techniques.

Document content extraction is crucial in computer vision, especially for meeting the high-quality data needs of large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technologies. However, current document parsing methods suffer from significant limitations in terms of diversity and comprehensive evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce OmniDocBench, a novel multi-source benchmark designed to advance automated document content extraction. OmniDocBench includes a meticulously curated and annotated high-quality evaluation dataset comprising nine diverse document types, such as academic papers, textbooks, slides, among others. Our benchmark provides a flexible and comprehensive evaluation framework with 19 layout category labels and 14 attribute labels, enabling multi-level assessments across entire datasets, individual modules, or specific data types. Using OmniDocBench, we perform an exhaustive comparative analysis of existing modular pipelines and multimodal end-to-end methods, highlighting their limitations in handling document diversity and ensuring fair evaluation. OmniDocBench establishes a robust, diverse, and fair evaluation standard for the document content extraction field, offering crucial insights for future advancements and fostering the development of document parsing technologies. The codes and dataset is available in https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench.

We introduce DEsignBench, a text-to-image (T2I) generation benchmark tailored for visual design scenarios. Recent T2I models like DALL-E 3 and others, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating photorealistic images that align closely with textual inputs. While the allure of creating visually captivating images is undeniable, our emphasis extends beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. We aim to investigate the potential of using these powerful models in authentic design contexts. In pursuit of this goal, we develop DEsignBench, which incorporates test samples designed to assess T2I models on both "design technical capability" and "design application scenario." Each of these two dimensions is supported by a diverse set of specific design categories. We explore DALL-E 3 together with other leading T2I models on DEsignBench, resulting in a comprehensive visual gallery for side-by-side comparisons. For DEsignBench benchmarking, we perform human evaluations on generated images in DEsignBench gallery, against the criteria of image-text alignment, visual aesthetic, and design creativity. Our evaluation also considers other specialized design capabilities, including text rendering, layout composition, color harmony, 3D design, and medium style. In addition to human evaluations, we introduce the first automatic image generation evaluator powered by GPT-4V. This evaluator provides ratings that align well with human judgments, while being easily replicable and cost-efficient. A high-resolution version is available at https://github.com/design-bench/design-bench.github.io/raw/main/designbench.pdf?download=

Automatically generating and iteratively editing academic slide decks requires more than document summarization. It demands faithful content selection, coherent slide organization, layout-aware rendering, and robust multi-turn instruction following. However, existing benchmarks and evaluation protocols do not adequately measure these challenges. To address this gap, we introduce the Deck Edits and Compliance Kit Benchmark (DECKBench), an evaluation framework for multi-agent slide generation and editing. DECKBench is built on a curated dataset of paper to slide pairs augmented with realistic, simulated editing instructions. Our evaluation protocol systematically assesses slide-level and deck-level fidelity, coherence, layout quality, and multi-turn instruction following. We further implement a modular multi-agent baseline system that decomposes the slide generation and editing task into paper parsing and summarization, slide planning, HTML creation, and iterative editing. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed benchmark highlights strengths, exposes failure modes, and provides actionable insights for improving multi-agent slide generation and editing systems. Overall, this work establishes a standardized foundation for reproducible and comparable evaluation of academic presentation generation and editing. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/morgan-heisler/DeckBench .

We present a system for generating indoor scenes in response to text prompts. The prompts are not limited to a fixed vocabulary of scene descriptions, and the objects in generated scenes are not restricted to a fixed set of object categories -- we call this setting indoor scene generation. Unlike most prior work on indoor scene generation, our system does not require a large training dataset of existing 3D scenes. Instead, it leverages the world knowledge encoded in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to synthesize programs in a domain-specific layout language that describe objects and spatial relations between them. Executing such a program produces a specification of a constraint satisfaction problem, which the system solves using a gradient-based optimization scheme to produce object positions and orientations. To produce object geometry, the system retrieves 3D meshes from a database. Unlike prior work which uses databases of category-annotated, mutually-aligned meshes, we develop a pipeline using vision-language models (VLMs) to retrieve meshes from massive databases of un-annotated, inconsistently-aligned meshes. Experimental evaluations show that our system outperforms generative models trained on 3D data for traditional, closed-universe scene generation tasks; it also outperforms a recent LLM-based layout generation method on open-universe scene generation.

Text-to-image generation has greatly advanced content creation, yet accurately rendering visual text remains a key challenge due to blurred glyphs, semantic drift, and limited style control. Existing methods often rely on pre-rendered glyph images as conditions, but these struggle to retain original font styles and color cues, necessitating complex multi-branch designs that increase model overhead and reduce flexibility. To address these issues, we propose a segmentation-guided framework that uses pixel-level visual text masks -- rich in glyph shape, color, and spatial detail -- as unified conditional inputs. Our method introduces two core components: (1) a fine-tuned bilingual segmentation model for precise text mask extraction, and (2) a streamlined diffusion model augmented with adaptive glyph conditioning and a region-specific loss to preserve textual fidelity in both content and style. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the AnyText benchmark, significantly surpassing prior methods in both Chinese and English settings. To enable more rigorous evaluation, we also introduce two new benchmarks: GlyphMM-benchmark for testing layout and glyph consistency in complex typesetting, and MiniText-benchmark for assessing generation quality in small-scale text regions. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in both scenarios, particularly excelling at small text rendering and complex layout preservation, validating its strong generalization and deployment readiness.

Understanding documents with rich layouts and multi-modal components is a long-standing and practical task. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks, particularly in single-page document understanding (DU). However, their abilities on long-context DU remain an open problem. This work presents MMLongBench-Doc, a long-context, multi-modal benchmark comprising 1,062 expert-annotated questions. Distinct from previous datasets, it is constructed upon 130 lengthy PDF-formatted documents with an average of 49.4 pages and 20,971 textual tokens. Towards comprehensive evaluation, answers to these questions rely on pieces of evidence from (1) different sources (text, image, chart, table, and layout structure) and (2) various locations (i.e. page number). Moreover, 33.2% of the questions are cross-page questions requiring evidence across multiple pages. 22.8% of the questions are designed to be unanswerable for detecting potential hallucinations. Experiments on 14 LVLMs demonstrate that long-context DU greatly challenges current models. Notably, the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an F1 score of only 42.7%, while the second-best, GPT-4V, scores 31.4%. Furthermore, 12 LVLMs (all except GPT-4o and GPT-4V) even present worse performance than their LLM counterparts which are fed with lossy-parsed OCR documents. These results validate the necessity of future research toward more capable long-context LVLMs. Project Page: https://mayubo2333.github.io/MMLongBench-Doc

Image-conditioned generation methods, such as depth- and canny-conditioned approaches, have demonstrated remarkable abilities for precise image synthesis. However, existing models still struggle to accurately control the content of multiple instances (or regions). Even state-of-the-art models like FLUX and 3DIS face challenges, such as attribute leakage between instances, which limits user control. To address these issues, we introduce DreamRenderer, a training-free approach built upon the FLUX model. DreamRenderer enables users to control the content of each instance via bounding boxes or masks, while ensuring overall visual harmony. We propose two key innovations: 1) Bridge Image Tokens for Hard Text Attribute Binding, which uses replicated image tokens as bridge tokens to ensure that T5 text embeddings, pre-trained solely on text data, bind the correct visual attributes for each instance during Joint Attention; 2) Hard Image Attribute Binding applied only to vital layers. Through our analysis of FLUX, we identify the critical layers responsible for instance attribute rendering and apply Hard Image Attribute Binding only in these layers, using soft binding in the others. This approach ensures precise control while preserving image quality. Evaluations on the COCO-POS and COCO-MIG benchmarks demonstrate that DreamRenderer improves the Image Success Ratio by 17.7% over FLUX and enhances the performance of layout-to-image models like GLIGEN and 3DIS by up to 26.8%. Project Page: https://limuloo.github.io/DreamRenderer/.

Academic project websites can more effectively disseminate research when they clearly present core content and enable intuitive navigation and interaction. However, current approaches such as direct Large Language Model (LLM) generation, templates, or direct HTML conversion struggle to produce layout-aware, interactive sites, and a comprehensive evaluation suite for this task has been lacking. In this paper, we introduce Paper2Web, a benchmark dataset and multi-dimensional evaluation framework for assessing academic webpage generation. It incorporates rule-based metrics like Connectivity, Completeness and human-verified LLM-as-a-Judge (covering interactivity, aesthetics, and informativeness), and PaperQuiz, which measures paper-level knowledge retention. We further present PWAgent, an autonomous pipeline that converts scientific papers into interactive and multimedia-rich academic homepages. The agent iteratively refines both content and layout through MCP tools that enhance emphasis, balance, and presentation quality. Our experiments show that PWAgent consistently outperforms end-to-end baselines like template-based webpages and arXiv/alphaXiv versions by a large margin while maintaining low cost, achieving the Pareto-front in academic webpage generation.

Recent document question answering models consist of two key components: the vision encoder, which captures layout and visual elements in images, and a Large Language Model (LLM) that helps contextualize questions to the image and supplements them with external world knowledge to generate accurate answers. However, the relative contributions of the vision encoder and the language model in these tasks remain unclear. This is especially interesting given the effectiveness of instruction-tuned LLMs, which exhibit remarkable adaptability to new tasks. To this end, we explore the following aspects in this work: (1) The efficacy of an LLM-only approach on document question answering tasks (2) strategies for serializing textual information within document images and feeding it directly to an instruction-tuned LLM, thus bypassing the need for an explicit vision encoder (3) thorough quantitative analysis on the feasibility of such an approach. Our comprehensive analysis encompasses six diverse benchmark datasets, utilizing LLMs of varying scales. Our findings reveal that a strategy exclusively reliant on the LLM yields results that are on par with or closely approach state-of-the-art performance across a range of datasets. We posit that this evaluation framework will serve as a guiding resource for selecting appropriate datasets for future research endeavors that emphasize the fundamental importance of layout and image content information.

Generating accurate multilingual text with diffusion models has long been desired but remains challenging. Recent methods have made progress in rendering text in a single language, but rendering arbitrary languages is still an unexplored area. This paper introduces EasyText, a text rendering framework based on DiT (Diffusion Transformer), which connects denoising latents with multilingual character tokens encoded as character tokens. We propose character positioning encoding and position encoding interpolation techniques to achieve controllable and precise text rendering. Additionally, we construct a large-scale synthetic text image dataset with 1 million multilingual image-text annotations as well as a high-quality dataset of 20K annotated images, which are used for pretraining and fine-tuning respectively. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and advancement of our approach in multilingual text rendering, visual quality, and layout-aware text integration.

Real-world design documents (e.g., posters) are inherently multi-layered, combining decoration, text, and images. Editing them from natural-language instructions requires fine-grained, layer-aware reasoning to identify relevant layers and coordinate modifications. Prior work largely overlooks multi-layer design document editing, focusing instead on single-layer image editing or multi-layer generation, which assume a flat canvas and lack the reasoning needed to determine what and where to modify. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-Layer Document Editing Agent (MiLDEAgent), a reasoning-based framework that combines an RL-trained multimodal reasoner for layer-wise understanding with an image editor for targeted modifications. To systematically benchmark this setting, we introduce the MiLDEBench, a human-in-the-loop corpus of over 20K design documents paired with diverse editing instructions. The benchmark is complemented by a task-specific evaluation protocol, MiLDEEval, which spans four dimensions including instruction following, layout consistency, aesthetics, and text rendering. Extensive experiments on 14 open-source and 2 closed-source models reveal that existing approaches fail to generalize: open-source models often cannot complete multi-layer document editing tasks, while closed-source models suffer from format violations. In contrast, MiLDEAgent achieves strong layer-aware reasoning and precise editing, significantly outperforming all open-source baselines and attaining performance comparable to closed-source models, thereby establishing the first strong baseline for multi-layer document editing.

Indoor scene generation has attracted significant attention recently as it is crucial for applications of gaming, virtual reality, and interior design. Current indoor scene generation methods can produce reasonable room layouts but often lack diversity and realism. This is primarily due to the limited coverage of existing datasets, including only large furniture without tiny furnishings in daily life. To address these challenges, we propose FurniScene, a large-scale 3D room dataset with intricate furnishing scenes from interior design professionals. Specifically, the FurniScene consists of 11,698 rooms and 39,691 unique furniture CAD models with 89 different types, covering things from large beds to small teacups on the coffee table. To better suit fine-grained indoor scene layout generation, we introduce a novel Two-Stage Diffusion Scene Model (TSDSM) and conduct an evaluation benchmark for various indoor scene generation based on FurniScene. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the capability of our method to generate highly realistic indoor scenes. Our dataset and code will be publicly available soon.

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.

PubMed-OCR is an OCR-centric corpus of scientific articles derived from PubMed Central Open Access PDFs. Each page image is annotated with Google Cloud Vision and released in a compact JSON schema with word-, line-, and paragraph-level bounding boxes. The corpus spans 209.5K articles (1.5M pages; ~1.3B words) and supports layout-aware modeling, coordinate-grounded QA, and evaluation of OCR-dependent pipelines. We analyze corpus characteristics (e.g., journal coverage and detected layout features) and discuss limitations, including reliance on a single OCR engine and heuristic line reconstruction. We release the data and schema to facilitate downstream research and invite extensions.

Near-term quantum workloads are shaped by coupled compilation and execution choices: qubit layout, routing, basis translation, gate suppression, measurement mitigation, shot budget, and artifact reproducibility. This paper analyzes QBalance, a Python workflow library for dataset-level selection among quantum compilation, noise-suppression, and error-mitigation strategies built on the Qiskit ecosystem. The contribution is formulated as a finite multi-objective strategy-selection problem over circuits, backends, and transformation policies. The manuscript derives the implemented weighted objective, non-dominated selection rule, survival-product error proxy, Bayesian linear candidate-ordering surrogate, and distributional diagnostics. It also positions the system relative to established work on Qiskit pass-manager compilation, SABRE-style routing, randomized compiling, dynamical decoupling, zero-noise extrapolation, matrix-free measurement mitigation, circuit cutting, and Thompson sampling. The analysis shows that QBalance provides a reproducible orchestration and artifact model for quantum workflow studies. It also establishes precise limitations: the current bandit mechanism orders candidates but does not reduce the number of candidate evaluations, the custom layout heuristic is greedy and only partially topology-aware, the implemented ZNE helper is parity-centered, and the cutting integration is a hook rather than a full reconstruction pipeline.

Large Language Models (LLMs) motivate generative agent simulation (e.g., AI Town) to create a ``dynamic world'', holding immense value across entertainment and research. However, for non-experts, especially those without programming skills, it isn't easy to customize a visualizable environment by themselves. In this paper, we introduce World Craft, an agentic world creation framework to create an executable and visualizable AI Town via user textual descriptions. It consists of two main modules, World Scaffold and World Guild. World Scaffold is a structured and concise standardization to develop interactive game scenes, serving as an efficient scaffolding for LLMs to customize an executable AI Town-like environment. World Guild is a multi-agent framework to progressively analyze users' intents from rough descriptions, and synthesizes required structured contents (\eg environment layout and assets) for World Scaffold . Moreover, we construct a high-quality error-correction dataset via reverse engineering to enhance spatial knowledge and improve the stability and controllability of layout generation, while reporting multi-dimensional evaluation metrics for further analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing commercial code agents (Cursor and Antigravity) and LLMs (Qwen3 and Gemini-3-Pro). in scene construction and narrative intent conveyance, providing a scalable solution for the democratization of environment creation.

Most existing robotic manipulation benchmarks focus on simplified tabletop scenarios, typically involving a stationary robotic arm interacting with various objects on a flat surface. To address this limitation, we introduce RoboBenchMart, a more challenging and realistic benchmark designed for dark store environments, where robots must perform complex manipulation tasks with diverse grocery items. This setting presents significant challenges, including dense object clutter and varied spatial configurations -- with items positioned at different heights, depths, and in close proximity. By targeting the retail domain, our benchmark addresses a setting with strong potential for near-term automation impact. We demonstrate that current state-of-the-art generalist models struggle to solve even common retail tasks. To support further research, we release the RoboBenchMart suite, which includes a procedural store layout generator, a trajectory generation pipeline, evaluation tools and fine-tuned baseline models.

Tasks in the aerospace industry heavily rely on searching and reusing large volumes of technical documents, yet there is no public information retrieval (IR) benchmark that reflects the terminology- and query-intent characteristics of this domain. To address this gap, this paper proposes the STELLA (Self-Reflective TErminoLogy-Aware Framework for BuiLding an Aerospace Information Retrieval Benchmark) framework. Using this framework, we introduce the STELLA benchmark, an aerospace-specific IR evaluation set constructed from NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) documents via a systematic pipeline that comprises document layout detection, passage chunking, terminology dictionary construction, synthetic query generation, and cross-lingual extension. The framework generates two types of queries: the Terminology Concordant Query (TCQ), which includes the terminology verbatim to evaluate lexical matching, and the Terminology Agnostic Query (TAQ), which utilizes the terminology's description to assess semantic matching. This enables a disentangled evaluation of the lexical and semantic matching capabilities of embedding models. In addition, we combine Chain-of-Density (CoD) and the Self-Reflection method with query generation to improve quality and implement a hybrid cross-lingual extension that reflects real user querying practices. Evaluation of seven embedding models on the STELLA benchmark shows that large decoder-based embedding models exhibit the strongest semantic understanding, while lexical matching methods such as BM25 remain highly competitive in domains where exact lexical matching technical term is crucial. The STELLA benchmark provides a reproducible foundation for reliable performance evaluation and improvement of embedding models in aerospace-domain IR tasks. The STELLA benchmark can be found in https://huggingface.co/datasets/telepix/STELLA.

Recent advances in image generation models have expanded their applications beyond aesthetic imagery toward practical visual content creation. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on natural image synthesis and fail to systematically evaluate models under the structured and multi-constraint requirements of real-world commercial design tasks. In this work, we introduce BizGenEval, a systematic benchmark for commercial visual content generation. The benchmark spans five representative document types: slides, charts, webpages, posters, and scientific figures, and evaluates four key capability dimensions: text rendering, layout control, attribute binding, and knowledge-based reasoning, forming 20 diverse evaluation tasks. BizGenEval contains 400 carefully curated prompts and 8000 human-verified checklist questions to rigorously assess whether generated images satisfy complex visual and semantic constraints. We conduct large-scale benchmarking on 26 popular image generation systems, including state-of-the-art commercial APIs and leading open-source models. The results reveal substantial capability gaps between current generative models and the requirements of professional visual content creation. We hope BizGenEval serves as a standardized benchmark for real-world commercial visual content generation.

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.

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.

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.

We propose a new generative model for layout generation. We generate layouts in three steps. First, we generate the layout elements as nodes in a layout graph. Second, we compute constraints between layout elements as edges in the layout graph. Third, we solve for the final layout using constrained optimization. For the first two steps, we build on recent transformer architectures. The layout optimization implements the constraints efficiently. We show three practical contributions compared to the state of the art: our work requires no user input, produces higher quality layouts, and enables many novel capabilities for conditional layout generation.

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 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.

Text logo design heavily relies on the creativity and expertise of professional designers, in which arranging element layouts is one of the most important procedures. However, few attention has been paid to this specific task which needs to take precise textural details and user constraints into consideration, but only on the broader tasks such as document/poster layout generation. In this paper, we propose a VLM-based framework that generates content-aware text logo layouts by integrating multi-modal inputs with user constraints, supporting a more flexible and stable layout design in real-world applications. We introduce two model techniques to reduce the computation for processing multiple glyph images simultaneously, while does not face performance degradation. To support instruction-tuning of out model, we construct two extensive text logo datasets, which are 5x more larger than the existing public dataset. Except for the geometric annotations (e.g. text masks and character recognition), we also compliment with comprehensive layout descriptions in natural language format, for more effective training to have reasoning ability when dealing with complex layouts and custom user constraints. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model and datasets, when comparing with previous methods in various benchmarks to evaluate geometric aesthetics and human preferences. The code and datasets will be publicly available.

This paper defines and explores the design space for information extraction (IE) from layout-rich documents using large language models (LLMs). The three core challenges of layout-aware IE with LLMs are 1) data structuring, 2) model engagement, and 3) output refinement. Our study delves into the sub-problems within these core challenges, such as input representation, chunking, prompting, and selection of LLMs and multimodal models. It examines the outcomes of different design choices through a new layout-aware IE test suite, benchmarking against the state-of-art (SoA) model LayoutLMv3. The results show that the configuration from one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) trial achieves near-optimal results with 14.1 points F1-score gain from the baseline model, while full factorial exploration yields only a slightly higher 15.1 points gain at around 36x greater token usage. We demonstrate that well-configured general-purpose LLMs can match the performance of specialized models, providing a cost-effective alternative. Our test-suite is freely available at https://github.com/gayecolakoglu/LayIE-LLM.

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.

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 .

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled automated generation of structured layouts from natural language descriptions. Existing methods typically follow a code-only paradigm that generates code to represent layouts, which are then rendered by graphic engines to produce final images. However, they are blind to the rendered visual outcome, making it difficult to guarantee readability and aesthetics. In this paper, we identify visual feedback as a critical factor in layout generation and propose Visual Feedback Layout Model (VFLM), a self-improving framework that leverages visual feedback iterative refinement. VFLM is capable of performing adaptive reflective generation, which leverages visual information to reflect on previous issues and iteratively generates outputs until satisfactory quality is achieved. It is achieved through reinforcement learning with a visually grounded reward model that incorporates OCR accuracy. By rewarding only the final generated outcome, we can effectively stimulate the model's iterative and reflective generative capabilities. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that VFLM consistently outperforms advanced MLLMs, existing layout models, and code-only baselines, establishing visual feedback as critical for design-oriented MLLMs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/FolSpark/VFLM.

Evaluating user interface (UI) design effectiveness extends beyond aesthetics to influencing user behavior, a principle central to Design Persuasiveness. A/B testing is the predominant method for determining which UI variations drive higher user engagement, but it is costly and time-consuming. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can process automated UI analysis, current approaches focus on isolated design attributes rather than comparative persuasiveness-the key factor in optimizing user interactions. To address this, we introduce WiserUI-Bench, a benchmark designed for Pairwise UI Design Persuasiveness Assessment task, featuring 300 real-world UI image pairs labeled with A/B test results and expert rationales. Additionally, we propose G-FOCUS, a novel inference-time reasoning strategy that enhances VLM-based persuasiveness assessment by reducing position bias and improving evaluation accuracy. Experimental results show that G-FOCUS surpasses existing inference strategies in consistency and accuracy for pairwise UI evaluation. Through promoting VLM-driven evaluation of UI persuasiveness, our work offers an approach to complement A/B testing, propelling progress in scalable UI preference modeling and design optimization. Code and data will be released publicly.

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.

Automatic generation of graphical layouts is crucial for many real-world applications, including designing posters, flyers, advertisements, and graphical user interfaces. Given the incredible ability of Large language models (LLMs) in both natural language understanding and generation, we believe that we could customize an LLM to help people create compelling graphical layouts starting with only text instructions from the user. We call our method TextLap (text-based layout planning). It uses a curated instruction-based layout planning dataset (InsLap) to customize LLMs as a graphic designer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TextLap and show that it outperforms strong baselines, including GPT-4 based methods, for image generation and graphical design benchmarks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Large ground-truth datasets and recent advances in deep learning techniques have been useful for layout detection. However, because of the restricted layout diversity of these datasets, training on them requires a sizable number of annotated instances, which is both expensive and time-consuming. As a result, differences between the source and target domains may significantly impact how well these models function. To solve this problem, domain adaptation approaches have been developed that use a small quantity of labeled data to adjust the model to the target domain. In this research, we introduced a synthetic document dataset called RanLayNet, enriched with automatically assigned labels denoting spatial positions, ranges, and types of layout elements. The primary aim of this endeavor is to develop a versatile dataset capable of training models with robustness and adaptability to diverse document formats. Through empirical experimentation, we demonstrate that a deep layout identification model trained on our dataset exhibits enhanced performance compared to a model trained solely on actual documents. Moreover, we conduct a comparative analysis by fine-tuning inference models using both PubLayNet and IIIT-AR-13K datasets on the Doclaynet dataset. Our findings emphasize that models enriched with our dataset are optimal for tasks such as achieving 0.398 and 0.588 mAP95 score in the scientific document domain for the TABLE class.

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.

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.

Despite steady progress in layout-to-image generation, current methods still struggle with layouts containing significant overlap between bounding boxes. We identify two primary challenges: (1) large overlapping regions and (2) overlapping instances with minimal semantic distinction. Through both qualitative examples and quantitative analysis, we demonstrate how these factors degrade generation quality. To systematically assess this issue, we introduce OverLayScore, a novel metric that quantifies the complexity of overlapping bounding boxes. Our analysis reveals that existing benchmarks are biased toward simpler cases with low OverLayScore values, limiting their effectiveness in evaluating model performance under more challenging conditions. To bridge this gap, we present OverLayBench, a new benchmark featuring high-quality annotations and a balanced distribution across different levels of OverLayScore. As an initial step toward improving performance on complex overlaps, we also propose CreatiLayout-AM, a model fine-tuned on a curated amodal mask dataset. Together, our contributions lay the groundwork for more robust layout-to-image generation under realistic and challenging scenarios. Project link: https://mlpc-ucsd.github.io/OverLayBench.

Diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable progress in generating realistic images. However, challenges remain in accurately understanding and synthesizing the layout requirements in the textual prompts. To align the generated image with layout instructions, we present a training-free layout calibration system SimM that intervenes in the generative process on the fly during inference time. Specifically, following a "check-locate-rectify" pipeline, the system first analyses the prompt to generate the target layout and compares it with the intermediate outputs to automatically detect errors. Then, by moving the located activations and making intra- and inter-map adjustments, the rectification process can be performed with negligible computational overhead. To evaluate SimM over a range of layout requirements, we present a benchmark SimMBench that compensates for the lack of superlative spatial relations in existing datasets. And both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SimM in calibrating the layout inconsistencies. Our project page is at https://simm-t2i.github.io/SimM.

In recent years, the use of multi-modal pre-trained Transformers has led to significant advancements in visually-rich document understanding. However, existing models have mainly focused on features such as text and vision while neglecting the importance of layout relationship between text nodes. In this paper, we propose GraphLayoutLM, a novel document understanding model that leverages the modeling of layout structure graph to inject document layout knowledge into the model. GraphLayoutLM utilizes a graph reordering algorithm to adjust the text sequence based on the graph structure. Additionally, our model uses a layout-aware multi-head self-attention layer to learn document layout knowledge. The proposed model enables the understanding of the spatial arrangement of text elements, improving document comprehension. We evaluate our model on various benchmarks, including FUNSD, XFUND and CORD, and achieve state-of-the-art results among these datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method provides a significant improvement over existing approaches and showcases the importance of incorporating layout information into document understanding models. We also conduct an ablation study to investigate the contribution of each component of our model. The results show that both the graph reordering algorithm and the layout-aware multi-head self-attention layer play a crucial role in achieving the best performance.

Although image generation has boosted various applications via its rapid evolution, whether the state-of-the-art models are able to produce ready-to-use academic illustrations for papers is still largely unexplored. Directly comparing or evaluating the illustration with VLM is native but requires oracle multi-modal understanding ability, which is unreliable for long and complex texts and illustrations. To address this, we propose AIBench, the first benchmark using VQA for evaluating logic correctness of the academic illustrations and VLMs for assessing aesthetics. In detail, we designed four levels of questions proposed from a logic diagram summarized from the method part of the paper, which query whether the generated illustration aligns with the paper on different scales. Our VQA-based approach raises more accurate and detailed evaluations on visual-logical consistency while relying less on the ability of the judger VLM. With our high-quality AIBench, we conduct extensive experiments and conclude that the performance gap between models on this task is significantly larger than general ones, reflecting their various complex reasoning and high-density generation ability. Further, the logic and aesthetics are hard to optimize simultaneously as in handcrafted illustrations. Additional experiments further state that test-time scaling on both abilities significantly boosts the performance on this task.

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.

In this paper, we study the content-aware layout generation problem, which aims to automatically generate layouts that are harmonious with a given background image. Existing methods usually deal with this task with a single-step reasoning framework. The lack of a feedback-based self-correction mechanism leads to their failure rates significantly increasing when faced with complex element layout planning. To address this challenge, we introduce SEGA, a novel Stepwise Evolution Paradigm for Content-Aware Layout Generation. Inspired by the systematic mode of human thinking, SEGA employs a hierarchical reasoning framework with a coarse-to-fine strategy: first, a coarse-level module roughly estimates the layout planning results; then, another refining module performs fine-level reasoning regarding the coarse planning results. Furthermore, we incorporate layout design principles as prior knowledge into the model to enhance its layout planning ability. Besides, we present GenPoster-100K that is a new large-scale poster dataset with rich meta-information annotation. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by achieving the state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmark datasets. Our project page is at: https://brucew91.github.io/SEGA.github.io/

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.

Generating images from scene graphs is a challenging task that attracted substantial interest recently. Prior works have approached this task by generating an intermediate layout description of the target image. However, the representation of each object in the layout was generated independently, which resulted in high overlap, low coverage, and an overall blurry layout. We propose a novel method that alleviates these issues by generating the entire layout description gradually to improve inter-object dependency. We empirically show on the COCO-STUFF dataset that our approach improves the quality of both the intermediate layout and the final image. Our approach improves the layout coverage by almost 20 points and drops object overlap to negligible amounts.

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.

Controllable layout generation refers to the process of creating a plausible visual arrangement of elements within a graphic design (e.g., document and web designs) with constraints representing design intentions. Although recent diffusion-based models have achieved state-of-the-art FID scores, they tend to exhibit more pronounced misalignment compared to earlier transformer-based models. In this work, we propose the LAyout Constraint diffusion modEl (LACE), a unified model to handle a broad range of layout generation tasks, such as arranging elements with specified attributes and refining or completing a coarse layout design. The model is based on continuous diffusion models. Compared with existing methods that use discrete diffusion models, continuous state-space design can enable the incorporation of differentiable aesthetic constraint functions in training. For conditional generation, we introduce conditions via masked input. Extensive experiment results show that LACE produces high-quality layouts and outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.

We introduce GraphicDesignBench (GDB), the first comprehensive benchmark suite designed specifically to evaluate AI models on the full breadth of professional graphic design tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on natural-image understanding or generic text-to-image synthesis, GDB targets the unique challenges of professional design work: translating communicative intent into structured layouts, rendering typographically faithful text, manipulating layered compositions, producing valid vector graphics, and reasoning about animation. The suite comprises 50 tasks organized along five axes: layout, typography, infographics, template & design semantics and animation, each evaluated under both understanding and generation settings, and grounded in real-world design templates drawn from the LICA layered-composition dataset. We evaluate a set of frontier closed-source models using a standardized metric taxonomy covering spatial accuracy, perceptual quality, text fidelity, semantic alignment, and structural validity. Our results reveal that current models fall short on the core challenges of professional design: spatial reasoning over complex layouts, faithful vector code generation, fine-grained typographic perception, and temporal decomposition of animations remain largely unsolved. While high-level semantic understanding is within reach, the gap widens sharply as tasks demand precision, structure, and compositional awareness. GDB provides a rigorous, reproducible testbed for tracking progress toward AI systems that can function as capable design collaborators. The full evaluation framework is publicly available.

This paper introduces layout-aware graph modeling for multimodal RAG. Different from traditional RAG methods that mostly deal with flat text chunks, the proposed method takes into account the relationship of multimodalities by using a graph structure. To do that, a graph modeling structure is defined based on document layout parsing. The structure of an input document is retained with the connection of text chunks, tables, and figures. This representation allows the method to handle complex questions that require information from multimodalities. To confirm the efficiency of the graph modeling, a flexible RAG pipeline is developed using robust components. Experimental results on four benchmark test sets confirm the contribution of the layout-aware modeling for performance improvement of the RAG pipeline.

Accurate document layout analysis is a key requirement for high-quality PDF document conversion. With the recent availability of public, large ground-truth datasets such as PubLayNet and DocBank, deep-learning models have proven to be very effective at layout detection and segmentation. While these datasets are of adequate size to train such models, they severely lack in layout variability since they are sourced from scientific article repositories such as PubMed and arXiv only. Consequently, the accuracy of the layout segmentation drops significantly when these models are applied on more challenging and diverse layouts. In this paper, we present DocLayNet, a new, publicly available, document-layout annotation dataset in COCO format. It contains 80863 manually annotated pages from diverse data sources to represent a wide variability in layouts. For each PDF page, the layout annotations provide labelled bounding-boxes with a choice of 11 distinct classes. DocLayNet also provides a subset of double- and triple-annotated pages to determine the inter-annotator agreement. In multiple experiments, we provide baseline accuracy scores (in mAP) for a set of popular object detection models. We also demonstrate that these models fall approximately 10\% behind the inter-annotator agreement. Furthermore, we provide evidence that DocLayNet is of sufficient size. Lastly, we compare models trained on PubLayNet, DocBank and DocLayNet, showing that layout predictions of the DocLayNet-trained models are more robust and thus the preferred choice for general-purpose document-layout analysis.

Large vision language models (LVLMs) have improved the document understanding capabilities remarkably, enabling the handling of complex document elements, longer contexts, and a wider range of tasks. However, existing document understanding benchmarks have been limited to handling only a small number of pages and fail to provide a comprehensive analysis of layout elements locating. In this paper, we first define three primary task categories: Long Document Understanding, numerical Reasoning, and cross-element Locating, and then propose a comprehensive benchmark, LongDocURL, integrating above three primary tasks and comprising 20 sub-tasks categorized based on different primary tasks and answer evidences. Furthermore, we develop a semi-automated construction pipeline and collect 2,325 high-quality question-answering pairs, covering more than 33,000 pages of documents, significantly outperforming existing benchmarks. Subsequently, we conduct comprehensive evaluation experiments on both open-source and closed-source models across 26 different configurations, revealing critical performance gaps in this field.

This technical report documents the development of novel Layout Analysis models integrated into the Docling document-conversion pipeline. We trained several state-of-the-art object detectors based on the RT-DETR, RT-DETRv2 and DFINE architectures on a heterogeneous corpus of 150,000 documents (both openly available and proprietary). Post-processing steps were applied to the raw detections to make them more applicable to the document conversion task. We evaluated the effectiveness of the layout analysis on various document benchmarks using different methodologies while also measuring the runtime performance across different environments (CPU, Nvidia and Apple GPUs). We introduce five new document layout models achieving 20.6% - 23.9% mAP improvement over Docling's previous baseline, with comparable or better runtime. Our best model, "heron-101", attains 78% mAP with 28 ms/image inference time on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments establish best practices for training, evaluating, and deploying document-layout detectors, providing actionable guidance for the document conversion community. All trained checkpoints, code, and documentation are released under a permissive license on HuggingFace.

Evaluating the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in following instructions has heavily relied on a powerful LLM as the judge, introducing unresolved biases that deviate the judgments from human judges. In this work, we reevaluate various choices for automatic evaluation on a wide range of instruction-following tasks. We experiment with methods that leverage human-written responses and observe that they enhance the reliability of automatic evaluations across a wide range of tasks, resulting in up to a 3.2% improvement in agreement with human judges. We also discovered that human-written responses offer an orthogonal perspective to model-generated responses in following instructions and should be used as an additional context when comparing model responses. Based on these observations, we develop a new evaluation benchmark, Human Response-Guided Evaluation of Instruction Following (HREF), comprising 4,258 samples across 11 task categories with a composite evaluation setup, employing a composite evaluation setup that selects the most reliable method for each category. In addition to providing reliable evaluation, HREF emphasizes individual task performance and is free from contamination. Finally, we study the impact of key design choices in HREF, including the size of the evaluation set, the judge model, the baseline model, and the prompt template. We host a live leaderboard that evaluates LLMs on the private evaluation set of HREF.

Recent years have witnessed the rise and success of pre-training techniques in visually-rich document understanding. However, most existing methods lack the systematic mining and utilization of layout-centered knowledge, leading to sub-optimal performances. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-Layout, a novel document pre-training solution with layout knowledge enhancement in the whole workflow, to learn better representations that combine the features from text, layout, and image. Specifically, we first rearrange input sequences in the serialization stage, and then present a correlative pre-training task, reading order prediction, to learn the proper reading order of documents. To improve the layout awareness of the model, we integrate a spatial-aware disentangled attention into the multi-modal transformer and a replaced regions prediction task into the pre-training phase. Experimental results show that ERNIE-Layout achieves superior performance on various downstream tasks, setting new state-of-the-art on key information extraction, document image classification, and document question answering datasets. The code and models are publicly available at http://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleNLP/tree/develop/model_zoo/ernie-layout.

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.

The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have stimulated interest among researchers and industry professionals, particularly in their application to tasks concerning mobile user interfaces (UIs). This position paper investigates the use of LLMs for UI layout generation. Central to our exploration is the introduction of UI grammar -- a novel approach we proposed to represent the hierarchical structure inherent in UI screens. The aim of this approach is to guide the generative capacities of LLMs more effectively and improve the explainability and controllability of the process. Initial experiments conducted with GPT-4 showed the promising capability of LLMs to produce high-quality user interfaces via in-context learning. Furthermore, our preliminary comparative study suggested the potential of the grammar-based approach in improving the quality of generative results in specific aspects.

Document layout analysis is a critical preprocessing step in document intelligence, enabling the detection and localization of structural elements such as titles, text blocks, tables, and formulas. Despite its importance, existing layout detection models face significant challenges in generalizing across diverse document types, handling complex layouts, and achieving real-time performance for large-scale data processing. To address these limitations, we present PP-DocLayout, which achieves high precision and efficiency in recognizing 23 types of layout regions across diverse document formats. To meet different needs, we offer three models of varying scales. PP-DocLayout-L is a high-precision model based on the RT-DETR-L detector, achieving 90.4% mAP@0.5 and an end-to-end inference time of 13.4 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-M is a balanced model, offering 75.2% mAP@0.5 with an inference time of 12.7 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-S is a high-efficiency model designed for resource-constrained environments and real-time applications, with an inference time of 8.1 ms per page on a T4 GPU and 14.5 ms on a CPU. This work not only advances the state of the art in document layout analysis but also provides a robust solution for constructing high-quality training data, enabling advancements in document intelligence and multimodal AI systems. Code and models are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleX .

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.

Multi-modal document retrieval is designed to identify and retrieve various forms of multi-modal content, such as figures, tables, charts, and layout information from extensive documents. Despite its significance, there is a notable lack of a robust benchmark to effectively evaluate the performance of systems in multi-modal document retrieval. To address this gap, this work introduces a new benchmark, named as MMDocIR, encompassing two distinct tasks: page-level and layout-level retrieval. The former focuses on localizing the most relevant pages within a long document, while the latter targets the detection of specific layouts, offering a more fine-grained granularity than whole-page analysis. A layout can refer to a variety of elements such as textual paragraphs, equations, figures, tables, or charts. The MMDocIR benchmark comprises a rich dataset featuring expertly annotated labels for 1,685 questions and bootstrapped labels for 173,843 questions, making it a pivotal resource for advancing multi-modal document retrieval for both training and evaluation. Through rigorous experiments, we reveal that (i) visual retrievers significantly outperform their text counterparts, (ii) MMDocIR train set can effectively benefit the training process of multi-modal document retrieval and (iii) text retrievers leveraging on VLM-text perform much better than those using OCR-text. These findings underscores the potential advantages of integrating visual elements for multi-modal document retrieval.

Recent advances in document image analysis (DIA) have been primarily driven by the application of neural networks. Ideally, research outcomes could be easily deployed in production and extended for further investigation. However, various factors like loosely organized codebases and sophisticated model configurations complicate the easy reuse of important innovations by a wide audience. Though there have been on-going efforts to improve reusability and simplify deep learning (DL) model development in disciplines like natural language processing and computer vision, none of them are optimized for challenges in the domain of DIA. This represents a major gap in the existing toolkit, as DIA is central to academic research across a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This paper introduces layoutparser, an open-source library for streamlining the usage of DL in DIA research and applications. The core layoutparser library comes with a set of simple and intuitive interfaces for applying and customizing DL models for layout detection, character recognition, and many other document processing tasks. To promote extensibility, layoutparser also incorporates a community platform for sharing both pre-trained models and full document digitization pipelines. We demonstrate that layoutparser is helpful for both lightweight and large-scale digitization pipelines in real-word use cases. The library is publicly available at https://layout-parser.github.io/.

Pre-training of text and layout has proved effective in a variety of visually-rich document understanding tasks due to its effective model architecture and the advantage of large-scale unlabeled scanned/digital-born documents. We propose LayoutLMv2 architecture with new pre-training tasks to model the interaction among text, layout, and image in a single multi-modal framework. Specifically, with a two-stream multi-modal Transformer encoder, LayoutLMv2 uses not only the existing masked visual-language modeling task but also the new text-image alignment and text-image matching tasks, which make it better capture the cross-modality interaction in the pre-training stage. Meanwhile, it also integrates a spatial-aware self-attention mechanism into the Transformer architecture so that the model can fully understand the relative positional relationship among different text blocks. Experiment results show that LayoutLMv2 outperforms LayoutLM by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of downstream visually-rich document understanding tasks, including FUNSD (0.7895 to 0.8420), CORD (0.9493 to 0.9601), SROIE (0.9524 to 0.9781), Kleister-NDA (0.8340 to 0.8520), RVL-CDIP (0.9443 to 0.9564), and DocVQA (0.7295 to 0.8672). We made our model and code publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutlmv2.

Multi-agent systems built upon large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tackling complex compositional tasks. In this work, we apply this paradigm to the paper-to-poster generation problem, a practical yet time-consuming process faced by researchers preparing for conferences. While recent approaches have attempted to automate this task, most neglect core design and aesthetic principles, resulting in posters that require substantial manual refinement. To address these design limitations, we propose PosterGen, a multi-agent framework that mirrors the workflow of professional poster designers. It consists of four collaborative specialized agents: (1) Parser and Curator agents extract content from the paper and organize storyboard; (2) Layout agent maps the content into a coherent spatial layout; (3) Stylist agents apply visual design elements such as color and typography; and (4) Renderer composes the final poster. Together, these agents produce posters that are both semantically grounded and visually appealing. To evaluate design quality, we introduce a vision-language model (VLM)-based rubric that measures layout balance, readability, and aesthetic coherence. Experimental results show that PosterGen consistently matches in content fidelity, and significantly outperforms existing methods in visual designs, generating posters that are presentation-ready with minimal human refinements.

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.