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Dec 12

CircuitSense: A Hierarchical Circuit System Benchmark Bridging Visual Comprehension and Symbolic Reasoning in Engineering Design Process

Engineering design operates through hierarchical abstraction from system specifications to component implementations, requiring visual understanding coupled with mathematical reasoning at each level. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at natural image tasks, their ability to extract mathematical models from technical diagrams remains unexplored. We present CircuitSense, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating circuit understanding across this hierarchy through 8,006+ problems spanning component-level schematics to system-level block diagrams. Our benchmark uniquely examines the complete engineering workflow: Perception, Analysis, and Design, with a particular emphasis on the critical but underexplored capability of deriving symbolic equations from visual inputs. We introduce a hierarchical synthetic generation pipeline consisting of a grid-based schematic generator and a block diagram generator with auto-derived symbolic equation labels. Comprehensive evaluation of six state-of-the-art MLLMs, including both closed-source and open-source models, reveals fundamental limitations in visual-to-mathematical reasoning. Closed-source models achieve over 85\% accuracy on perception tasks involving component recognition and topology identification, yet their performance on symbolic derivation and analytical reasoning falls below 19\%, exposing a critical gap between visual parsing and symbolic reasoning. Models with stronger symbolic reasoning capabilities consistently achieve higher design task accuracy, confirming the fundamental role of mathematical understanding in circuit synthesis and establishing symbolic reasoning as the key metric for engineering competence.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 26

DiagrammerGPT: Generating Open-Domain, Open-Platform Diagrams via LLM Planning

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has seen significant growth over the past few years. Despite this, there has been little work on generating diagrams with T2I models. A diagram is a symbolic/schematic representation that explains information using structurally rich and spatially complex visualizations (e.g., a dense combination of related objects, text labels, directional arrows, connection lines, etc.). Existing state-of-the-art T2I models often fail at diagram generation because they lack fine-grained object layout control when many objects are densely connected via complex relations such as arrows/lines and also often fail to render comprehensible text labels. To address this gap, we present DiagrammerGPT, a novel two-stage text-to-diagram generation framework that leverages the layout guidance capabilities of LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) to generate more accurate open-domain, open-platform diagrams. In the first stage, we use LLMs to generate and iteratively refine 'diagram plans' (in a planner-auditor feedback loop) which describe all the entities (objects and text labels), their relationships (arrows or lines), and their bounding box layouts. In the second stage, we use a diagram generator, DiagramGLIGEN, and a text label rendering module to generate diagrams following the diagram plans. To benchmark the text-to-diagram generation task, we introduce AI2D-Caption, a densely annotated diagram dataset built on top of the AI2D dataset. We show quantitatively and qualitatively that our DiagrammerGPT framework produces more accurate diagrams, outperforming existing T2I models. We also provide comprehensive analysis including open-domain diagram generation, vector graphic diagram generation in different platforms, human-in-the-loop diagram plan editing, and multimodal planner/auditor LLMs (e.g., GPT-4Vision). We hope our work can inspire further research on diagram generation via T2I models and LLMs.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 18, 2023

PosterLLaVa: Constructing a Unified Multi-modal Layout Generator with LLM

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 4, 2024 2

Drawing2CAD: Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for CAD Generation from Vector Drawings

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) generative modeling is driving significant innovations across industrial applications. Recent works have shown remarkable progress in creating solid models from various inputs such as point clouds, meshes, and text descriptions. However, these methods fundamentally diverge from traditional industrial workflows that begin with 2D engineering drawings. The automatic generation of parametric CAD models from these 2D vector drawings remains underexplored despite being a critical step in engineering design. To address this gap, our key insight is to reframe CAD generation as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem where vector drawing primitives directly inform the generation of parametric CAD operations, preserving geometric precision and design intent throughout the transformation process. We propose Drawing2CAD, a framework with three key technical components: a network-friendly vector primitive representation that preserves precise geometric information, a dual-decoder transformer architecture that decouples command type and parameter generation while maintaining precise correspondence, and a soft target distribution loss function accommodating inherent flexibility in CAD parameters. To train and evaluate Drawing2CAD, we create CAD-VGDrawing, a dataset of paired engineering drawings and parametric CAD models, and conduct thorough experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lllssc/Drawing2CAD.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 26 3

Neural Circuit Diagrams: Robust Diagrams for the Communication, Implementation, and Analysis of Deep Learning Architectures

Diagrams matter. Unfortunately, the deep learning community has no standard method for diagramming architectures. The current combination of linear algebra notation and ad-hoc diagrams fails to offer the necessary precision to understand architectures in all their detail. However, this detail is critical for faithful implementation, mathematical analysis, further innovation, and ethical assurances. I present neural circuit diagrams, a graphical language tailored to the needs of communicating deep learning architectures. Neural circuit diagrams naturally keep track of the changing arrangement of data, precisely show how operations are broadcast over axes, and display the critical parallel behavior of linear operations. A lingering issue with existing diagramming methods is the inability to simultaneously express the detail of axes and the free arrangement of data, which neural circuit diagrams solve. Their compositional structure is analogous to code, creating a close correspondence between diagrams and implementation. In this work, I introduce neural circuit diagrams for an audience of machine learning researchers. After introducing neural circuit diagrams, I cover a host of architectures to show their utility and breed familiarity. This includes the transformer architecture, convolution (and its difficult-to-explain extensions), residual networks, the U-Net, and the vision transformer. I include a Jupyter notebook that provides evidence for the close correspondence between diagrams and code. Finally, I examine backpropagation using neural circuit diagrams. I show their utility in providing mathematical insight and analyzing algorithms' time and space complexities.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 8, 2024 1

SketchAgent: Generating Structured Diagrams from Hand-Drawn Sketches

Hand-drawn sketches are a natural and efficient medium for capturing and conveying ideas. Despite significant advancements in controllable natural image generation, translating freehand sketches into structured, machine-readable diagrams remains a labor-intensive and predominantly manual task. The primary challenge stems from the inherent ambiguity of sketches, which lack the structural constraints and semantic precision required for automated diagram generation. To address this challenge, we introduce SketchAgent, a multi-agent system designed to automate the transformation of hand-drawn sketches into structured diagrams. SketchAgent integrates sketch recognition, symbolic reasoning, and iterative validation to produce semantically coherent and structurally accurate diagrams, significantly reducing the need for manual effort. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we propose the Sketch2Diagram Benchmark, a comprehensive dataset and evaluation framework encompassing eight diverse diagram categories, such as flowcharts, directed graphs, and model architectures. The dataset comprises over 6,000 high-quality examples with token-level annotations, standardized preprocessing, and rigorous quality control. By streamlining the diagram generation process, SketchAgent holds great promise for applications in design, education, and engineering, while offering a significant step toward bridging the gap between intuitive sketching and machine-readable diagram generation. The benchmark is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DiagramAgent/Sketch2Diagram-Benchmark.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 2

OpenECAD: An Efficient Visual Language Model for Editable 3D-CAD Design

Computer-aided design (CAD) tools are utilized in the manufacturing industry for modeling everything from cups to spacecraft. These programs are complex to use and typically require years of training and experience to master. Structured and well-constrained 2D sketches and 3D constructions are crucial components of CAD modeling. A well-executed CAD model can be seamlessly integrated into the manufacturing process, thereby enhancing production efficiency. Deep generative models of 3D shapes and 3D object reconstruction models have garnered significant research interest. However, most of these models produce discrete forms of 3D objects that are not editable. Moreover, the few models based on CAD operations often have substantial input restrictions. In this work, we fine-tuned pre-trained models to create OpenECAD models (0.55B, 0.89B, 2.4B and 3.1B), leveraging the visual, logical, coding, and general capabilities of visual language models. OpenECAD models can process images of 3D designs as input and generate highly structured 2D sketches and 3D construction commands, ensuring that the designs are editable. These outputs can be directly used with existing CAD tools' APIs to generate project files. To train our network, we created a series of OpenECAD datasets. These datasets are derived from existing public CAD datasets, adjusted and augmented to meet the specific requirements of vision language model (VLM) training. Additionally, we have introduced an approach that utilizes dependency relationships to define and generate sketches, further enriching the content and functionality of the datasets.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024

On the Diagram of Thought

We introduce Diagram of Thought (DoT), a framework that models iterative reasoning in large language models (LLMs) as the construction of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) within a single model. Unlike traditional approaches that represent reasoning as linear chains or trees, DoT organizes propositions, critiques, refinements, and verifications into a cohesive DAG structure, allowing the model to explore complex reasoning pathways while maintaining logical consistency. Each node in the diagram corresponds to a proposition that has been proposed, critiqued, refined, or verified, enabling the LLM to iteratively improve its reasoning through natural language feedback. By leveraging auto-regressive next-token prediction with role-specific tokens, DoT facilitates seamless transitions between proposing ideas and critically evaluating them, providing richer feedback than binary signals. Furthermore, we formalize the DoT framework using Topos Theory, providing a mathematical foundation that ensures logical consistency and soundness in the reasoning process. This approach enhances both the training and inference processes within a single LLM, eliminating the need for multiple models or external control mechanisms. DoT offers a conceptual framework for designing next-generation reasoning-specialized models, emphasizing training efficiency, robust reasoning capabilities, and theoretical grounding. The code is available at https://github.com/diagram-of-thought/diagram-of-thought.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 16, 2024 2

mPLUG-PaperOwl: Scientific Diagram Analysis with the Multimodal Large Language Model

Recently, the strong text creation ability of Large Language Models(LLMs) has given rise to many tools for assisting paper reading or even writing. However, the weak diagram analysis abilities of LLMs or Multimodal LLMs greatly limit their application scenarios, especially for scientific academic paper writing. In this work, towards a more versatile copilot for academic paper writing, we mainly focus on strengthening the multi-modal diagram analysis ability of Multimodal LLMs. By parsing Latex source files of high-quality papers, we carefully build a multi-modal diagram understanding dataset M-Paper. By aligning diagrams in the paper with related paragraphs, we construct professional diagram analysis samples for training and evaluation. M-Paper is the first dataset to support joint comprehension of multiple scientific diagrams, including figures and tables in the format of images or Latex codes. Besides, to better align the copilot with the user's intention, we introduce the `outline' as the control signal, which could be directly given by the user or revised based on auto-generated ones. Comprehensive experiments with a state-of-the-art Mumtimodal LLM demonstrate that training on our dataset shows stronger scientific diagram understanding performance, including diagram captioning, diagram analysis, and outline recommendation. The dataset, code, and model are available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl/tree/main/PaperOwl.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 29, 2023

PAID: A Framework of Product-Centric Advertising Image Design

Creating visually appealing advertising images is often a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. Is it possible to automatically generate such images using only basic product information--specifically, a product foreground image, taglines, and a target size? Existing methods mainly focus on parts of the problem and fail to provide a comprehensive solution. To address this gap, we propose a novel multistage framework called Product-Centric Advertising Image Design (PAID). It consists of four sequential stages to highlight product foregrounds and taglines while achieving overall image aesthetics: prompt generation, layout generation, background image generation, and graphics rendering. Different expert models are designed and trained for the first three stages: First, we use a visual language model (VLM) to generate background prompts that match the products. Next, a VLM-based layout generation model arranges the placement of product foregrounds, graphic elements (taglines and decorative underlays), and various nongraphic elements (objects from the background prompt). Following this, we train an SDXL-based image generation model that can simultaneously accept prompts, layouts, and foreground controls. To support the PAID framework, we create corresponding datasets with over 50,000 labeled images. Extensive experimental results and online A/B tests demonstrate that PAID can produce more visually appealing advertising images.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 24

MMGDreamer: Mixed-Modality Graph for Geometry-Controllable 3D Indoor Scene Generation

Controllable 3D scene generation has extensive applications in virtual reality and interior design, where the generated scenes should exhibit high levels of realism and controllability in terms of geometry. Scene graphs provide a suitable data representation that facilitates these applications. However, current graph-based methods for scene generation are constrained to text-based inputs and exhibit insufficient adaptability to flexible user inputs, hindering the ability to precisely control object geometry. To address this issue, we propose MMGDreamer, a dual-branch diffusion model for scene generation that incorporates a novel Mixed-Modality Graph, visual enhancement module, and relation predictor. The mixed-modality graph allows object nodes to integrate textual and visual modalities, with optional relationships between nodes. It enhances adaptability to flexible user inputs and enables meticulous control over the geometry of objects in the generated scenes. The visual enhancement module enriches the visual fidelity of text-only nodes by constructing visual representations using text embeddings. Furthermore, our relation predictor leverages node representations to infer absent relationships between nodes, resulting in more coherent scene layouts. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MMGDreamer exhibits superior control of object geometry, achieving state-of-the-art scene generation performance. Project page: https://yangzhifeio.github.io/project/MMGDreamer.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 9

AutoStory: Generating Diverse Storytelling Images with Minimal Human Effort

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

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 19, 2023 3

PosterLayout: A New Benchmark and Approach for Content-aware Visual-Textual Presentation Layout

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 28, 2023

GlyphDraw: Seamlessly Rendering Text with Intricate Spatial Structures in Text-to-Image Generation

Recent breakthroughs in the field of language-guided image generation have yielded impressive achievements, enabling the creation of high-quality and diverse images based on user instructions.Although the synthesis performance is fascinating, one significant limitation of current image generation models is their insufficient ability to generate text coherently within images, particularly for complex glyph structures like Chinese characters. To address this problem, we introduce GlyphDraw, a general learning framework aiming to endow image generation models with the capacity to generate images coherently embedded with text for any specific language.We first sophisticatedly design the image-text dataset's construction strategy, then build our model specifically on a diffusion-based image generator and carefully modify the network structure to allow the model to learn drawing language characters with the help of glyph and position information.Furthermore, we maintain the model's open-domain image synthesis capability by preventing catastrophic forgetting by using parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques.Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method not only produces accurate language characters as in prompts, but also seamlessly blends the generated text into the background.Please refer to our https://1073521013.github.io/glyph-draw.github.io/{project page}. abstract

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 31, 2023

Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning With Preference Optimization For Visual Program Generation

Visual programming languages (VPLs) allow users to create programs through graphical interfaces, which results in easier accessibility and their widespread usage in various domains. To further enhance this accessibility, recent research has focused on generating VPL code from user instructions using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, by employing prompting-based methods, these studies have shown promising results. Nevertheless, such approaches can be less effective for industrial VPLs such as Ladder Diagram (LD). LD is a pivotal language used in industrial automation processes and involves extensive domain-specific configurations, which are difficult to capture in a single prompt. In this work, we demonstrate that training-based methods outperform prompting-based methods for LD generation accuracy, even with smaller backbone models. Building on these findings, we propose a two-stage training strategy to further enhance VPL generation. First, we employ retrieval-augmented fine-tuning to leverage the repetitive use of subroutines commonly seen in industrial VPLs. Second, we apply direct preference optimization (DPO) to further guide the model toward accurate outputs, using systematically generated preference pairs through graph editing operations. Extensive experiments on real-world LD data demonstrate that our approach improves program-level accuracy by over 10% compared to supervised fine-tuning, which highlights its potential to advance industrial automation.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 23

PlotGen: Multi-Agent LLM-based Scientific Data Visualization via Multimodal Feedback

Scientific data visualization is pivotal for transforming raw data into comprehensible visual representations, enabling pattern recognition, forecasting, and the presentation of data-driven insights. However, novice users often face difficulties due to the complexity of selecting appropriate tools and mastering visualization techniques. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated potential in assisting code generation, though they struggle with accuracy and require iterative debugging. In this paper, we propose PlotGen, a novel multi-agent framework aimed at automating the creation of precise scientific visualizations. PlotGen orchestrates multiple LLM-based agents, including a Query Planning Agent that breaks down complex user requests into executable steps, a Code Generation Agent that converts pseudocode into executable Python code, and three retrieval feedback agents - a Numeric Feedback Agent, a Lexical Feedback Agent, and a Visual Feedback Agent - that leverage multimodal LLMs to iteratively refine the data accuracy, textual labels, and visual correctness of generated plots via self-reflection. Extensive experiments show that PlotGen outperforms strong baselines, achieving a 4-6 percent improvement on the MatPlotBench dataset, leading to enhanced user trust in LLM-generated visualizations and improved novice productivity due to a reduction in debugging time needed for plot errors.

Visualizing Thought: Conceptual Diagrams Enable Robust Planning in LMMs

Human reasoning relies on constructing and manipulating mental models-simplified internal representations of situations that we use to understand and solve problems. Conceptual diagrams (for example, sketches drawn by humans to aid reasoning) externalize these mental models, abstracting irrelevant details to efficiently capture relational and spatial information. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) predominantly reason through textual representations, limiting their effectiveness in complex multi-step combinatorial and planning tasks. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot fully automatic framework that enables LMMs to reason through multiple chains of self-generated intermediate conceptual diagrams, significantly enhancing their combinatorial planning capabilities. Our approach does not require any human initialization beyond a natural language description of the task. It integrates both textual and diagrammatic reasoning within an optimized graph-of-thought inference framework, enhanced by beam search and depth-wise backtracking. Evaluated on multiple challenging PDDL planning domains, our method substantially improves GPT-4o's performance (for example, from 35.5% to 90.2% in Blocksworld). On more difficult planning domains with solution depths up to 40, our approach outperforms even the o1-preview reasoning model (for example, over 13% improvement in Parking). These results highlight the value of conceptual diagrams as a complementary reasoning medium in LMMs.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 14

CADmium: Fine-Tuning Code Language Models for Text-Driven Sequential CAD Design

Computer-aided design (CAD) is the digital construction of 2D and 3D objects, and is central to a wide range of engineering and manufacturing applications like automobile and aviation. Despite its importance, CAD modeling remains largely a time-intensive, manual task. Recent works have attempted to automate this process with small transformer-based models and handcrafted CAD sequence representations. However, there has been little effort to leverage the potential of large language models (LLMs) for sequential CAD design. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale dataset of more than 170k CAD models annotated with high-quality, human-like descriptions generated with our pipeline based on GPT-4.1. Using this dataset, we fine-tune powerful code-LLMs to generate CAD sequences represented in a JSON-based format from natural language descriptions, demonstrating the viability and effectiveness of this approach for text-conditioned CAD generation. Because simple metrics often fail to reflect the quality of generated objects, we introduce geometric and topological metrics based on sphericity, mean curvature, and Euler characteristic to provide richer structural insights. Our experiments and ablation studies on both synthetic and human-annotated data demonstrate that CADmium is able to automate CAD design, drastically speeding up the design of new objects. The dataset, code, and fine-tuned models are available online.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 13

ChartGPT: Leveraging LLMs to Generate Charts from Abstract Natural Language

The use of natural language interfaces (NLIs) for the creation of charts is becoming increasingly popular due to the intuitiveness of natural language interactions. One key challenge in this approach is to accurately capture user intents and transform them to proper chart specifications. This obstructs the wide use of NLI in chart generation, as users' natural language inputs are generally abstract (i.e., ambiguous or under-specified), without a clear specification of visual encodings. Recently, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have exhibited superior performance in understanding and generating natural language, demonstrating great potential for downstream tasks. Inspired by this major trend, we propose ChartGPT, generating charts from abstract natural language inputs. However, LLMs are struggling to address complex logic problems. To enable the model to accurately specify the complex parameters and perform operations in chart generation, we decompose the generation process into a step-by-step reasoning pipeline, so that the model only needs to reason a single and specific sub-task during each run. Moreover, LLMs are pre-trained on general datasets, which might be biased for the task of chart generation. To provide adequate visualization knowledge, we create a dataset consisting of abstract utterances and charts and improve model performance through fine-tuning. We further design an interactive interface for ChartGPT that allows users to check and modify the intermediate outputs of each step. The effectiveness of the proposed system is evaluated through quantitative evaluations and a user study.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 3, 2023

Non-Sequential Graph Script Induction via Multimedia Grounding

Online resources such as WikiHow compile a wide range of scripts for performing everyday tasks, which can assist models in learning to reason about procedures. However, the scripts are always presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. For example, in the CrossTask Dataset, 64.5% of consecutive step pairs are also observed in the reverse order, suggesting their ordering is not fixed. In addition, each step has an average of 2.56 frequent next steps, demonstrating "branching". In this paper, we propose the new challenging task of non-sequential graph script induction, aiming to capture optional and interchangeable steps in procedural planning. To automate the induction of such graph scripts for given tasks, we propose to take advantage of loosely aligned videos of people performing the tasks. In particular, we design a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps and thus transform each video into an observed step path on the latent ground truth graph script. This key transformation enables us to train a script knowledge model capable of both generating explicit graph scripts for learnt tasks and predicting future steps given a partial step sequence. Our best model outperforms the strongest pure text/vision baselines by 17.52% absolute gains on F1@3 for next step prediction and 13.8% absolute gains on Acc@1 for partial sequence completion. Human evaluation shows our model outperforming the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% absolute gains in capturing sequential and non-sequential step relationships.

  • 7 authors
·
May 27, 2023

CADDreamer: CAD object Generation from Single-view Images

Diffusion-based 3D generation has made remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing 3D generative models often produce overly dense and unstructured meshes, which stand in stark contrast to the compact, structured, and sharply-edged Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models crafted by human designers. To address this gap, we introduce CADDreamer, a novel approach for generating boundary representations (B-rep) of CAD objects from a single image. CADDreamer employs a primitive-aware multi-view diffusion model that captures both local geometric details and high-level structural semantics during the generation process. By encoding primitive semantics into the color domain, the method leverages the strong priors of pre-trained diffusion models to align with well-defined primitives. This enables the inference of multi-view normal maps and semantic maps from a single image, facilitating the reconstruction of a mesh with primitive labels. Furthermore, we introduce geometric optimization techniques and topology-preserving extraction methods to mitigate noise and distortion in the generated primitives. These enhancements result in a complete and seamless B-rep of the CAD model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers high-quality CAD objects from single-view images. Compared to existing 3D generation techniques, the B-rep models produced by CADDreamer are compact in representation, clear in structure, sharp in edges, and watertight in topology.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28

Leveraging Large Language Models For Scalable Vector Graphics Processing: A Review

In recent years, rapid advances in computer vision have significantly improved the processing and generation of raster images. However, vector graphics, which is essential in digital design, due to its scalability and ease of editing, have been relatively understudied. Traditional vectorization techniques, which are often used in vector generation, suffer from long processing times and excessive output complexity, limiting their usability in practical applications. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for the generation, editing, and analysis of vector graphics, particularly in the SVG format, which is inherently text-based and well-suited for integration with LLMs. This paper provides a systematic review of existing LLM-based approaches for SVG processing, categorizing them into three main tasks: generation, editing, and understanding. We observe notable models such as IconShop, StrokeNUWA, and StarVector, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we analyze benchmark datasets designed for assessing SVG-related tasks, including SVGEditBench, VGBench, and SGP-Bench, and conduct a series of experiments to evaluate various LLMs in these domains. Our results demonstrate that for vector graphics reasoning-enhanced models outperform standard LLMs, particularly in generation and understanding tasks. Furthermore, our findings underscore the need to develop more diverse and richly annotated datasets to further improve LLM capabilities in vector graphics tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 6

Effective Training Data Synthesis for Improving MLLM Chart Understanding

Being able to effectively read scientific plots, or chart understanding, is a central part toward building effective agents for science. However, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially open-source ones, are still falling behind with a typical success rate of 30%-50% on challenging benchmarks. Previous studies on fine-tuning MLLMs with synthetic charts are often restricted by their inadequate similarity to the real charts, which could compromise model training and performance on complex real-world charts. In this study, we show that modularizing chart generation and diversifying visual details improves chart understanding capabilities. In particular, we design a five-step data synthesis pipeline, where we separate data and function creation for single plot generation, condition the generation of later subplots on earlier ones for multi-subplot figures, visually diversify the generated figures, filter out low quality data, and finally generate the question-answer (QA) pairs with GPT-4o. This approach allows us to streamline the generation of fine-tuning datasets and introduce the effective chart dataset (ECD), which contains 10k+ chart images and 300k+ QA pairs, covering 25 topics and featuring 250+ chart type combinations with high visual complexity. We show that ECD consistently improves the performance of various MLLMs on a range of real-world and synthetic test sets. Code, data and models are available at: https://github.com/yuweiyang-anu/ECD.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 8

Improved Iterative Refinement for Chart-to-Code Generation via Structured Instruction

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention due to their powerful visual understanding capabilities. While they have achieved impressive results on various vision tasks, their performance on chart-to-code generation remains suboptimal. This task requires MLLMs to generate executable code that can reproduce a given chart, demanding not only precise visual understanding but also accurate translation of visual elements into structured code. Directly prompting MLLMs to perform this complex task often yields unsatisfactory results. To address this challenge, we propose {ChartIR}, an iterative refinement method based on structured instruction. First, we distinguish two tasks: visual understanding and code translation. To accomplish the visual understanding component, we design two types of structured instructions: description and difference. The description instruction captures the visual elements of the reference chart, while the difference instruction characterizes the discrepancies between the reference chart and the generated chart. These instructions effectively transform visual features into language representations, thereby facilitating the subsequent code translation process. Second, we decompose the overall chart generation pipeline into two stages: initial code generation and iterative refinement, enabling progressive enhancement of the final output. Experimental results show that, compared to other method, our method achieves superior performance on both the open-source model Qwen2-VL and the closed-source model GPT-4o.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 15 2

A Parse-Then-Place Approach for Generating Graphic Layouts from Textual Descriptions

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.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 24, 2023

Relation-Rich Visual Document Generator for Visual Information Extraction

Despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for visual document understanding (VDU), visual information extraction (VIE) from relation-rich documents remains challenging due to the layout diversity and limited training data. While existing synthetic document generators attempt to address data scarcity, they either rely on manually designed layouts and templates, or adopt rule-based approaches that limit layout diversity. Besides, current layout generation methods focus solely on topological patterns without considering textual content, making them impractical for generating documents with complex associations between the contents and layouts. In this paper, we propose a Relation-rIch visual Document GEnerator (RIDGE) that addresses these limitations through a two-stage approach: (1) Content Generation, which leverages LLMs to generate document content using a carefully designed Hierarchical Structure Text format which captures entity categories and relationships, and (2) Content-driven Layout Generation, which learns to create diverse, plausible document layouts solely from easily available Optical Character Recognition (OCR) results, requiring no human labeling or annotations efforts. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method significantly enhances the performance of document understanding models on various VIE benchmarks. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/AI-Application-and-Integration-Lab/RIDGE .

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 14

Interactive3D: Create What You Want by Interactive 3D Generation

3D object generation has undergone significant advancements, yielding high-quality results. However, fall short of achieving precise user control, often yielding results that do not align with user expectations, thus limiting their applicability. User-envisioning 3D object generation faces significant challenges in realizing its concepts using current generative models due to limited interaction capabilities. Existing methods mainly offer two approaches: (i) interpreting textual instructions with constrained controllability, or (ii) reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images. Both of them limit customization to the confines of the 2D reference and potentially introduce undesirable artifacts during the 3D lifting process, restricting the scope for direct and versatile 3D modifications. In this work, we introduce Interactive3D, an innovative framework for interactive 3D generation that grants users precise control over the generative process through extensive 3D interaction capabilities. Interactive3D is constructed in two cascading stages, utilizing distinct 3D representations. The first stage employs Gaussian Splatting for direct user interaction, allowing modifications and guidance of the generative direction at any intermediate step through (i) Adding and Removing components, (ii) Deformable and Rigid Dragging, (iii) Geometric Transformations, and (iv) Semantic Editing. Subsequently, the Gaussian splats are transformed into InstantNGP. We introduce a novel (v) Interactive Hash Refinement module to further add details and extract the geometry in the second stage. Our experiments demonstrate that Interactive3D markedly improves the controllability and quality of 3D generation. Our project webpage is available at https://interactive-3d.github.io/.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 25, 2024 1

LaTCoder: Converting Webpage Design to Code with Layout-as-Thought

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.

Text-to-CadQuery: A New Paradigm for CAD Generation with Scalable Large Model Capabilities

Computer-aided design (CAD) is fundamental to modern engineering and manufacturing, but creating CAD models still requires expert knowledge and specialized software. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) open up the possibility of generative CAD, where natural language is directly translated into parametric 3D models. However, most existing methods generate task-specific command sequences that pretrained models cannot directly handle. These sequences must be converted into CAD representations such as CAD vectors before a 3D model can be produced, which requires training models from scratch and adds unnecessary complexity. To tackle this issue, we propose generating CadQuery code directly from text, leveraging the strengths of pretrained LLMs to produce 3D models without intermediate representations, using this Python-based scripting language. Since LLMs already excel at Python generation and spatial reasoning, fine-tuning them on Text-to-CadQuery data proves highly effective. Given that these capabilities typically improve with scale, we hypothesize that larger models will perform better after fine-tuning. To enable this, we augment the Text2CAD dataset with 170,000 CadQuery annotations. We fine-tune six open-source LLMs of varying sizes and observe consistent improvements. Our best model achieves a top-1 exact match of 69.3%, up from 58.8%, and reduces Chamfer Distance by 48.6%. Project page: https://github.com/Text-to-CadQuery/Text-to-CadQuery.

  • 2 authors
·
May 10

Explanation Graph Generation via Pre-trained Language Models: An Empirical Study with Contrastive Learning

Pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language models have led to widespread success in many natural language generation tasks. However, there has been relatively less work on analyzing their ability to generate structured outputs such as graphs. Unlike natural language, graphs have distinct structural and semantic properties in the context of a downstream NLP task, e.g., generating a graph that is connected and acyclic can be attributed to its structural constraints, while the semantics of a graph can refer to how meaningfully an edge represents the relation between two node concepts. In this work, we study pre-trained language models that generate explanation graphs in an end-to-end manner and analyze their ability to learn the structural constraints and semantics of such graphs. We first show that with limited supervision, pre-trained language models often generate graphs that either violate these constraints or are semantically incoherent. Since curating large amount of human-annotated graphs is expensive and tedious, we propose simple yet effective ways of graph perturbations via node and edge edit operations that lead to structurally and semantically positive and negative graphs. Next, we leverage these graphs in different contrastive learning models with Max-Margin and InfoNCE losses. Our methods lead to significant improvements in both structural and semantic accuracy of explanation graphs and also generalize to other similar graph generation tasks. Lastly, we show that human errors are the best negatives for contrastive learning and also that automatically generating more such human-like negative graphs can lead to further improvements. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/swarnaHub/ExplagraphGen

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 10, 2022

SceneHGN: Hierarchical Graph Networks for 3D Indoor Scene Generation with Fine-Grained Geometry

3D indoor scenes are widely used in computer graphics, with applications ranging from interior design to gaming to virtual and augmented reality. They also contain rich information, including room layout, as well as furniture type, geometry, and placement. High-quality 3D indoor scenes are highly demanded while it requires expertise and is time-consuming to design high-quality 3D indoor scenes manually. Existing research only addresses partial problems: some works learn to generate room layout, and other works focus on generating detailed structure and geometry of individual furniture objects. However, these partial steps are related and should be addressed together for optimal synthesis. We propose SCENEHGN, a hierarchical graph network for 3D indoor scenes that takes into account the full hierarchy from the room level to the object level, then finally to the object part level. Therefore for the first time, our method is able to directly generate plausible 3D room content, including furniture objects with fine-grained geometry, and their layout. To address the challenge, we introduce functional regions as intermediate proxies between the room and object levels to make learning more manageable. To ensure plausibility, our graph-based representation incorporates both vertical edges connecting child nodes with parent nodes from different levels, and horizontal edges encoding relationships between nodes at the same level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces superior generation results, even when comparing results of partial steps with alternative methods that can only achieve these. We also demonstrate that our method is effective for various applications such as part-level room editing, room interpolation, and room generation by arbitrary room boundaries.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 16, 2023

Block and Detail: Scaffolding Sketch-to-Image Generation

We introduce a novel sketch-to-image tool that aligns with the iterative refinement process of artists. Our tool lets users sketch blocking strokes to coarsely represent the placement and form of objects and detail strokes to refine their shape and silhouettes. We develop a two-pass algorithm for generating high-fidelity images from such sketches at any point in the iterative process. In the first pass we use a ControlNet to generate an image that strictly follows all the strokes (blocking and detail) and in the second pass we add variation by renoising regions surrounding blocking strokes. We also present a dataset generation scheme that, when used to train a ControlNet architecture, allows regions that do not contain strokes to be interpreted as not-yet-specified regions rather than empty space. We show that this partial-sketch-aware ControlNet can generate coherent elements from partial sketches that only contain a small number of strokes. The high-fidelity images produced by our approach serve as scaffolds that can help the user adjust the shape and proportions of objects or add additional elements to the composition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a variety of examples and evaluative comparisons. Quantitatively, evaluative user feedback indicates that novice viewers prefer the quality of images from our algorithm over a baseline Scribble ControlNet for 84% of the pairs and found our images had less distortion in 81% of the pairs.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 28, 2024

Layout-Corrector: Alleviating Layout Sticking Phenomenon in Discrete Diffusion Model

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25, 2024

Blockwise Flow Matching: Improving Flow Matching Models For Efficient High-Quality Generation

Recently, Flow Matching models have pushed the boundaries of high-fidelity data generation across a wide range of domains. It typically employs a single large network to learn the entire generative trajectory from noise to data. Despite their effectiveness, this design struggles to capture distinct signal characteristics across timesteps simultaneously and incurs substantial inference costs due to the iterative evaluation of the entire model. To address these limitations, we propose Blockwise Flow Matching (BFM), a novel framework that partitions the generative trajectory into multiple temporal segments, each modeled by smaller but specialized velocity blocks. This blockwise design enables each block to specialize effectively in its designated interval, improving inference efficiency and sample quality. To further enhance generation fidelity, we introduce a Semantic Feature Guidance module that explicitly conditions velocity blocks on semantically rich features aligned with pretrained representations. Additionally, we propose a lightweight Feature Residual Approximation strategy that preserves semantic quality while significantly reducing inference cost. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256x256 demonstrate that BFM establishes a substantially improved Pareto frontier over existing Flow Matching methods, achieving 2.1x to 4.9x accelerations in inference complexity at comparable generation performance. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/BFM.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24

Pandora3D: A Comprehensive Framework for High-Quality 3D Shape and Texture Generation

This report presents a comprehensive framework for generating high-quality 3D shapes and textures from diverse input prompts, including single images, multi-view images, and text descriptions. The framework consists of 3D shape generation and texture generation. (1). The 3D shape generation pipeline employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to encode implicit 3D geometries into a latent space and a diffusion network to generate latents conditioned on input prompts, with modifications to enhance model capacity. An alternative Artist-Created Mesh (AM) generation approach is also explored, yielding promising results for simpler geometries. (2). Texture generation involves a multi-stage process starting with frontal images generation followed by multi-view images generation, RGB-to-PBR texture conversion, and high-resolution multi-view texture refinement. A consistency scheduler is plugged into every stage, to enforce pixel-wise consistency among multi-view textures during inference, ensuring seamless integration. The pipeline demonstrates effective handling of diverse input formats, leveraging advanced neural architectures and novel methodologies to produce high-quality 3D content. This report details the system architecture, experimental results, and potential future directions to improve and expand the framework. The source code and pretrained weights are released at: https://github.com/Tencent/Tencent-XR-3DGen.

Alfie: Democratising RGBA Image Generation With No $$$

Designs and artworks are ubiquitous across various creative fields, requiring graphic design skills and dedicated software to create compositions that include many graphical elements, such as logos, icons, symbols, and art scenes, which are integral to visual storytelling. Automating the generation of such visual elements improves graphic designers' productivity, democratizes and innovates the creative industry, and helps generate more realistic synthetic data for related tasks. These illustration elements are mostly RGBA images with irregular shapes and cutouts, facilitating blending and scene composition. However, most image generation models are incapable of generating such images and achieving this capability requires expensive computational resources, specific training recipes, or post-processing solutions. In this work, we propose a fully-automated approach for obtaining RGBA illustrations by modifying the inference-time behavior of a pre-trained Diffusion Transformer model, exploiting the prompt-guided controllability and visual quality offered by such models with no additional computational cost. We force the generation of entire subjects without sharp croppings, whose background is easily removed for seamless integration into design projects or artistic scenes. We show with a user study that, in most cases, users prefer our solution over generating and then matting an image, and we show that our generated illustrations yield good results when used as inputs for composite scene generation pipelines. We release the code at https://github.com/aimagelab/Alfie.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 27, 2024

SVGCraft: Beyond Single Object Text-to-SVG Synthesis with Comprehensive Canvas Layout

Generating VectorArt from text prompts is a challenging vision task, requiring diverse yet realistic depictions of the seen as well as unseen entities. However, existing research has been mostly limited to the generation of single objects, rather than comprehensive scenes comprising multiple elements. In response, this work introduces SVGCraft, a novel end-to-end framework for the creation of vector graphics depicting entire scenes from textual descriptions. Utilizing a pre-trained LLM for layout generation from text prompts, this framework introduces a technique for producing masked latents in specified bounding boxes for accurate object placement. It introduces a fusion mechanism for integrating attention maps and employs a diffusion U-Net for coherent composition, speeding up the drawing process. The resulting SVG is optimized using a pre-trained encoder and LPIPS loss with opacity modulation to maximize similarity. Additionally, this work explores the potential of primitive shapes in facilitating canvas completion in constrained environments. Through both qualitative and quantitative assessments, SVGCraft is demonstrated to surpass prior works in abstraction, recognizability, and detail, as evidenced by its performance metrics (CLIP-T: 0.4563, Cosine Similarity: 0.6342, Confusion: 0.66, Aesthetic: 6.7832). The code will be available at https://github.com/ayanban011/SVGCraft.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 30, 2024

BlockFusion: Expandable 3D Scene Generation using Latent Tri-plane Extrapolation

We present BlockFusion, a diffusion-based model that generates 3D scenes as unit blocks and seamlessly incorporates new blocks to extend the scene. BlockFusion is trained using datasets of 3D blocks that are randomly cropped from complete 3D scene meshes. Through per-block fitting, all training blocks are converted into the hybrid neural fields: with a tri-plane containing the geometry features, followed by a Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) for decoding the signed distance values. A variational auto-encoder is employed to compress the tri-planes into the latent tri-plane space, on which the denoising diffusion process is performed. Diffusion applied to the latent representations allows for high-quality and diverse 3D scene generation. To expand a scene during generation, one needs only to append empty blocks to overlap with the current scene and extrapolate existing latent tri-planes to populate new blocks. The extrapolation is done by conditioning the generation process with the feature samples from the overlapping tri-planes during the denoising iterations. Latent tri-plane extrapolation produces semantically and geometrically meaningful transitions that harmoniously blend with the existing scene. A 2D layout conditioning mechanism is used to control the placement and arrangement of scene elements. Experimental results indicate that BlockFusion is capable of generating diverse, geometrically consistent and unbounded large 3D scenes with unprecedented high-quality shapes in both indoor and outdoor scenarios.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 30, 2024 1

HAIChart: Human and AI Paired Visualization System

The growing importance of data visualization in business intelligence and data science emphasizes the need for tools that can efficiently generate meaningful visualizations from large datasets. Existing tools fall into two main categories: human-powered tools (e.g., Tableau and PowerBI), which require intensive expert involvement, and AI-powered automated tools (e.g., Draco and Table2Charts), which often fall short of guessing specific user needs. In this paper, we aim to achieve the best of both worlds. Our key idea is to initially auto-generate a set of high-quality visualizations to minimize manual effort, then refine this process iteratively with user feedback to more closely align with their needs. To this end, we present HAIChart, a reinforcement learning-based framework designed to iteratively recommend good visualizations for a given dataset by incorporating user feedback. Specifically, we propose a Monte Carlo Graph Search-based visualization generation algorithm paired with a composite reward function to efficiently explore the visualization space and automatically generate good visualizations. We devise a visualization hints mechanism to actively incorporate user feedback, thus progressively refining the visualization generation module. We further prove that the top-k visualization hints selection problem is NP-hard and design an efficient algorithm. We conduct both quantitative evaluations and user studies, showing that HAIChart significantly outperforms state-of-the-art human-powered tools (21% better at Recall and 1.8 times faster) and AI-powered automatic tools (25.1% and 14.9% better in terms of Hit@3 and R10@30, respectively).

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 16, 2024

CAD-MLLM: Unifying Multimodality-Conditioned CAD Generation With MLLM

This paper aims to design a unified Computer-Aided Design (CAD) generation system that can easily generate CAD models based on the user's inputs in the form of textual description, images, point clouds, or even a combination of them. Towards this goal, we introduce the CAD-MLLM, the first system capable of generating parametric CAD models conditioned on the multimodal input. Specifically, within the CAD-MLLM framework, we leverage the command sequences of CAD models and then employ advanced large language models (LLMs) to align the feature space across these diverse multi-modalities data and CAD models' vectorized representations. To facilitate the model training, we design a comprehensive data construction and annotation pipeline that equips each CAD model with corresponding multimodal data. Our resulting dataset, named Omni-CAD, is the first multimodal CAD dataset that contains textual description, multi-view images, points, and command sequence for each CAD model. It contains approximately 450K instances and their CAD construction sequences. To thoroughly evaluate the quality of our generated CAD models, we go beyond current evaluation metrics that focus on reconstruction quality by introducing additional metrics that assess topology quality and surface enclosure extent. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CAD-MLLM significantly outperforms existing conditional generative methods and remains highly robust to noises and missing points. The project page and more visualizations can be found at: https://cad-mllm.github.io/

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024 9

ChartMaster: Advancing Chart-to-Code Generation with Real-World Charts and Chart Similarity Reinforcement Learning

The chart-to-code generation task requires MLLMs to convert chart images into executable code. This task faces two main challenges: limited data diversity and the difficulty of maintaining visual consistency between generated charts and the original ones. Existing datasets mainly rely on synthetic seed data to prompt GPT models for code generation, resulting in homogeneous samples that limit model generalization to real-world chart styles. To address this, we propose ReChartPrompt, leveraging real-world, human-designed charts extracted from arXiv papers as prompts. By harnessing the rich content and diverse visual styles of arXiv charts, we construct ReChartPrompt-240K, a large-scale and highly diverse dataset that better reflects realistic chart variations. For the second challenge, although SFT improves code understanding by optimizing next-token prediction, it does not provide direct supervision on visual features. As a result, it often fails to guarantee that the generated charts visually match the original ones. To address this, we propose ChartSimRL, a GRPO-based reinforcement learning algorithm guided by a novel chart similarity reward. This reward consists of two components: attribute similarity, which measures the overlap of chart attributes like layout and color between the generated and original charts, and visual similarity, which evaluates overall visual features, including texture, using convolutional neural networks. Unlike traditional text-based rewards, our reward accounts for the multimodal nature of the chart-to-code generation task, significantly enhancing the model's ability to accurately reproduce charts. Integrating ReChartPrompt and ChartSimRL, we develop the ChartMaster model, achieving SOTA results among 7B-parameter models and rivaling GPT-4o on various chart-to-code benchmarks. All resources are available at https://github.com/WentaoTan/ChartMaster.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 24

COLE: A Hierarchical Generation Framework for Multi-Layered and Editable Graphic Design

Graphic design, which has been evolving since the 15th century, plays a crucial role in advertising. The creation of high-quality designs demands design-oriented planning, reasoning, and layer-wise generation. Unlike the recent CanvaGPT, which integrates GPT-4 with existing design templates to build a custom GPT, this paper introduces the COLE system - a hierarchical generation framework designed to comprehensively address these challenges. This COLE system can transform a vague intention prompt into a high-quality multi-layered graphic design, while also supporting flexible editing based on user input. Examples of such input might include directives like ``design a poster for Hisaishi's concert.'' The key insight is to dissect the complex task of text-to-design generation into a hierarchy of simpler sub-tasks, each addressed by specialized models working collaboratively. The results from these models are then consolidated to produce a cohesive final output. Our hierarchical task decomposition can streamline the complex process and significantly enhance generation reliability. Our COLE system comprises multiple fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs), Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), and Diffusion Models (DMs), each specifically tailored for design-aware layer-wise captioning, layout planning, reasoning, and the task of generating images and text. Furthermore, we construct the DESIGNINTENTION benchmark to demonstrate the superiority of our COLE system over existing methods in generating high-quality graphic designs from user intent. Last, we present a Canva-like multi-layered image editing tool to support flexible editing of the generated multi-layered graphic design images. We perceive our COLE system as an important step towards addressing more complex and multi-layered graphic design generation tasks in the future.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 28, 2023

IconShop: Text-Guided Vector Icon Synthesis with Autoregressive Transformers

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a popular vector image format that offers good support for interactivity and animation. Despite its appealing characteristics, creating custom SVG content can be challenging for users due to the steep learning curve required to understand SVG grammars or get familiar with professional editing software. Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have inspired researchers to explore vector graphics synthesis using either image-based methods (i.e., text -> raster image -> vector graphics) combining text-to-image generation models with image vectorization, or language-based methods (i.e., text -> vector graphics script) through pretrained large language models. However, these methods still suffer from limitations in terms of generation quality, diversity, and flexibility. In this paper, we introduce IconShop, a text-guided vector icon synthesis method using autoregressive transformers. The key to success of our approach is to sequentialize and tokenize SVG paths (and textual descriptions as guidance) into a uniquely decodable token sequence. With that, we are able to fully exploit the sequence learning power of autoregressive transformers, while enabling both unconditional and text-conditioned icon synthesis. Through standard training to predict the next token on a large-scale vector icon dataset accompanied by textural descriptions, the proposed IconShop consistently exhibits better icon synthesis capability than existing image-based and language-based methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Meanwhile, we observe a dramatic improvement in generation diversity, which is validated by the objective Uniqueness and Novelty measures. More importantly, we demonstrate the flexibility of IconShop with multiple novel icon synthesis tasks, including icon editing, icon interpolation, icon semantic combination, and icon design auto-suggestion.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 27, 2023

FlexCAD: Unified and Versatile Controllable CAD Generation with Fine-tuned Large Language Models

Recently, there is a growing interest in creating computer-aided design (CAD) models based on user intent, known as controllable CAD generation. Existing work offers limited controllability and needs separate models for different types of control, reducing efficiency and practicality. To achieve controllable generation across all CAD construction hierarchies, such as sketch-extrusion, extrusion, sketch, face, loop and curve, we propose FlexCAD, a unified model by fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). First, to enhance comprehension by LLMs, we represent a CAD model as a structured text by abstracting each hierarchy as a sequence of text tokens. Second, to address various controllable generation tasks in a unified model, we introduce a hierarchy-aware masking strategy. Specifically, during training, we mask a hierarchy-aware field in the CAD text with a mask token. This field, composed of a sequence of tokens, can be set flexibly to represent various hierarchies. Subsequently, we ask LLMs to predict this masked field. During inference, the user intent is converted into a CAD text with a mask token replacing the part the user wants to modify, which is then fed into FlexCAD to generate new CAD models. Comprehensive experiments on public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of FlexCAD in both generation quality and controllability. Code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/FlexCAD.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024

LATTICE: Democratize High-Fidelity 3D Generation at Scale

We present LATTICE, a new framework for high-fidelity 3D asset generation that bridges the quality and scalability gap between 3D and 2D generative models. While 2D image synthesis benefits from fixed spatial grids and well-established transformer architectures, 3D generation remains fundamentally more challenging due to the need to predict both spatial structure and detailed geometric surfaces from scratch. These challenges are exacerbated by the computational complexity of existing 3D representations and the lack of structured and scalable 3D asset encoding schemes. To address this, we propose VoxSet, a semi-structured representation that compresses 3D assets into a compact set of latent vectors anchored to a coarse voxel grid, enabling efficient and position-aware generation. VoxSet retains the simplicity and compression advantages of prior VecSet methods while introducing explicit structure into the latent space, allowing positional embeddings to guide generation and enabling strong token-level test-time scaling. Built upon this representation, LATTICE adopts a two-stage pipeline: first generating a sparse voxelized geometry anchor, then producing detailed geometry using a rectified flow transformer. Our method is simple at its core, but supports arbitrary resolution decoding, low-cost training, and flexible inference schemes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various aspects, and offering a significant step toward scalable, high-quality 3D asset creation.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 23 2

MermaidSeqBench: An Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-to-Mermaid Sequence Diagram Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent capabilities in generating structured diagrams from natural language descriptions. In particular, they have shown great promise in generating sequence diagrams for software engineering, typically represented in a text-based syntax such as Mermaid. However, systematic evaluations in this space remain underdeveloped as there is a lack of existing benchmarks to assess the LLM's correctness in this task. To address this shortcoming, we introduce MermaidSeqBench, a human-verified and LLM-synthetically-extended benchmark for assessing an LLM's capabilities in generating Mermaid sequence diagrams from textual prompts. The benchmark consists of a core set of 132 samples, starting from a small set of manually crafted and verified flows. These were expanded via a hybrid methodology combining human annotation, in-context LLM prompting, and rule-based variation generation. Our benchmark uses an LLM-as-a-judge model to assess Mermaid sequence diagram generation across fine-grained metrics, including syntax correctness, activation handling, error handling, and practical usability. We perform initial evaluations on numerous state-of-the-art LLMs and utilize multiple LLM judge models to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our benchmark. Our results reveal significant capability gaps across models and evaluation modes. Our proposed benchmark provides a foundation for advancing research in structured diagram generation and for developing more rigorous, fine-grained evaluation methodologies.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 18

Joint Generative Modeling of Scene Graphs and Images via Diffusion Models

In this paper, we present a novel generative task: joint scene graph - image generation. While previous works have explored image generation conditioned on scene graphs or layouts, our task is distinctive and important as it involves generating scene graphs themselves unconditionally from noise, enabling efficient and interpretable control for image generation. Our task is challenging, requiring the generation of plausible scene graphs with heterogeneous attributes for nodes (objects) and edges (relations among objects), including continuous object bounding boxes and discrete object and relation categories. We introduce a novel diffusion model, DiffuseSG, that jointly models the adjacency matrix along with heterogeneous node and edge attributes. We explore various types of encodings for the categorical data, relaxing it into a continuous space. With a graph transformer being the denoiser, DiffuseSG successively denoises the scene graph representation in a continuous space and discretizes the final representation to generate the clean scene graph. Additionally, we introduce an IoU regularization to enhance the empirical performance. Our model significantly outperforms existing methods in scene graph generation on the Visual Genome and COCO-Stuff datasets, both on standard and newly introduced metrics that better capture the problem complexity. Moreover, we demonstrate the additional benefits of our model in two downstream applications: 1) excelling in a series of scene graph completion tasks, and 2) improving scene graph detection models by using extra training samples generated from DiffuseSG.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 2, 2024

LLM Blueprint: Enabling Text-to-Image Generation with Complex and Detailed Prompts

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023 1

Generating Images with 3D Annotations Using Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful generative method, capable of producing stunning photo-realistic images from natural language descriptions. However, these models lack explicit control over the 3D structure in the generated images. Consequently, this hinders our ability to obtain detailed 3D annotations for the generated images or to craft instances with specific poses and distances. In this paper, we propose 3D Diffusion Style Transfer (3D-DST), which incorporates 3D geometry control into diffusion models. Our method exploits ControlNet, which extends diffusion models by using visual prompts in addition to text prompts. We generate images of the 3D objects taken from 3D shape repositories (e.g., ShapeNet and Objaverse), render them from a variety of poses and viewing directions, compute the edge maps of the rendered images, and use these edge maps as visual prompts to generate realistic images. With explicit 3D geometry control, we can easily change the 3D structures of the objects in the generated images and obtain ground-truth 3D annotations automatically. This allows us to improve a wide range of vision tasks, e.g., classification and 3D pose estimation, in both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on ImageNet-100/200, ImageNet-R, PASCAL3D+, ObjectNet3D, and OOD-CV. The results show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods, e.g., 3.8 percentage points on ImageNet-100 using DeiT-B.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 13, 2023

ChartM^3: A Multi-Stage Code-Driven Pipeline for Constructing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Step Visual Reasoning Data in Chart Comprehension

Complex chart understanding tasks demand advanced visual recognition and reasoning capabilities from multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current research provides limited coverage of complex chart scenarios and computation-intensive reasoning tasks prevalent in real-world applications. This study proposes an automated multi-stage code-driven pipeline for systematically generating visual reasoning datasets to address these limitations. The pipeline integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to retrieve professional chart templates and employs chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies to generate reasoning codes that simulate real data distributions, thereby driving chart rendering and question-related statistical computations. Through model-based evaluation, the pipeline enhances chart diversity and data quality. Using this framework, we construct ChartM^3, a multi-dimensional and multi-step dataset containing 38K charts and 142K Q&A pairs for training, along with 2,871 high-quality evaluation samples for enabling practical performance assessment. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) experiments demonstrate that our dataset significantly improves reasoning capabilities and cross-domain generalization performance, enabling smaller models to achieve performance comparable to larger-scale models in complex chart comprehension.