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.
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.
Advertising posters, a form of information presentation, combine visual and linguistic modalities. Creating a poster involves multiple steps and necessitates design experience and creativity. This paper introduces AutoPoster, a highly automatic and content-aware system for generating advertising posters. With only product images and titles as inputs, AutoPoster can automatically produce posters of varying sizes through four key stages: image cleaning and retargeting, layout generation, tagline generation, and style attribute prediction. To ensure visual harmony of posters, two content-aware models are incorporated for layout and tagline generation. Moreover, we propose a novel multi-task Style Attribute Predictor (SAP) to jointly predict visual style attributes. Meanwhile, to our knowledge, we propose the first poster generation dataset that includes visual attribute annotations for over 76k posters. Qualitative and quantitative outcomes from user studies and experiments substantiate the efficacy of our system and the aesthetic superiority of the generated posters compared to other poster generation methods.
Modeling and designing urban building layouts is of significant interest in computer vision, computer graphics, and urban applications. A building layout consists of a set of buildings in city blocks defined by a network of roads. We observe that building layouts are discrete structures, consisting of multiple rows of buildings of various shapes, and are amenable to skeletonization for mapping arbitrary city block shapes to a canonical form. Hence, we propose a fully automatic approach to building layout generation using graph attention networks. Our method generates realistic urban layouts given arbitrary road networks, and enables conditional generation based on learned priors. Our results, including user study, demonstrate superior performance as compared to prior layout generation networks, support arbitrary city block and varying building shapes as demonstrated by generating layouts for 28 large cities.
Procedurally generating cities in Minecraft provides players more diverse scenarios and could help understand and improve the design of cities in other digital worlds and the real world. This paper presents a city generator that was submitted as an entry to the 2023 Edition of Minecraft Settlement Generation Competition for Minecraft. The generation procedure is composed of six main steps, namely vegetation clearing, terrain reshaping, building layout generation, route planning, streetlight placement, and wall construction. Three algorithms, including a heuristic-based algorithm, an evolving layout algorithm, and a random one are applied to generate the building layout, thus determining where to place different redstone style buildings, and tested by generating cities on random maps in limited time. Experimental results show that the heuristic-based algorithm is capable of finding an acceptable building layout faster for flat maps, while the evolving layout algorithm performs better in evolving layout for rugged maps. A user study is conducted to compare our generator with outstanding entries of the competition's 2022 edition using the competition's evaluation criteria and shows that our generator performs well in the adaptation and functionality criteria
Poster layout is a crucial aspect of poster design. Prior methods primarily focus on the correlation between visual content and graphic elements. However, a pleasant layout should also consider the relationship between visual and textual contents and the relationship between elements. In this study, we introduce a relation-aware diffusion model for poster layout generation that incorporates these two relationships in the generation process. Firstly, we devise a visual-textual relation-aware module that aligns the visual and textual representations across modalities, thereby enhancing the layout's efficacy in conveying textual information. Subsequently, we propose a geometry relation-aware module that learns the geometry relationship between elements by comprehensively considering contextual information. Additionally, the proposed method can generate diverse layouts based on user constraints. To advance research in this field, we have constructed a poster layout dataset named CGL-Dataset V2. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CGL-Dataset V2. The data and code will be available at https://github.com/liuan0803/RADM.
We present VMap, a map-like rectangular space-filling visualization, to perform vertex-centric graph exploration. Existing visualizations have limited support for quality optimization among rectangular aspect ratios, vertex-edge intersection, and data encoding accuracy. To tackle this problem, VMap integrates three novel components: (1) a desired-aspect-ratio (DAR) rectangular partitioning algorithm, (2) a two-stage rectangle adjustment algorithm, and (3) a simulated annealing based heuristic optimizer. First, to generate a rectangular space-filling layout of an input graph, we subdivide the 2D embedding of the graph into rectangles with optimization of rectangles' aspect ratios toward a desired aspect ratio. Second, to route graph edges between rectangles without vertex-edge occlusion, we devise a two-stage algorithm to adjust a rectangular layout to insert border space between rectangles. Third, to produce and arrange rectangles by considering multiple visual criteria, we design a simulated annealing based heuristic optimization to adjust vertices' 2D embedding to support trade-offs among aspect ratio quality and the encoding accuracy of vertices' weights and adjacency. We evaluated the effectiveness of VMap on both synthetic and application datasets. The resulting rectangular layout has better aspect ratio quality on synthetic data compared with the existing method for the rectangular partitioning of 2D points. On three real-world datasets, VMap achieved better encoding accuracy and attained faster generation speed compared with existing methods on graphs' rectangular layout generation. We further illustrate the usefulness of VMap for vertex-centric graph exploration through three case studies on visualizing social networks, representing academic communities, and displaying geographic information.
Accurate Story visualization requires several necessary elements, such as identity consistency across frames, the alignment between plain text and visual content, and a reasonable layout of objects in images. Most previous works endeavor to meet these requirements by fitting a text-to-image (T2I) model on a set of videos in the same style and with the same characters, e.g., the FlintstonesSV dataset. However, the learned T2I models typically struggle to adapt to new characters, scenes, and styles, and often lack the flexibility to revise the layout of the synthesized images. This paper proposes a system for generic interactive story visualization, capable of handling multiple novel characters and supporting the editing of layout and local structure. It is developed by leveraging the prior knowledge of large language and T2I models, trained on massive corpora. The system comprises four interconnected components: story-to-prompt generation (S2P), text-to-layout generation (T2L), controllable text-to-image generation (C-T2I), and image-to-video animation (I2V). First, the S2P module converts concise story information into detailed prompts required for subsequent stages. Next, T2L generates diverse and reasonable layouts based on the prompts, offering users the ability to adjust and refine the layout to their preference. The core component, C-T2I, enables the creation of images guided by layouts, sketches, and actor-specific identifiers to maintain consistency and detail across visualizations. Finally, I2V enriches the visualization process by animating the generated images. Extensive experiments and a user study are conducted to validate the effectiveness and flexibility of interactive editing of the proposed system.
We propose a cyclic generative adversarial network with spatial-wise and channel-wise attention modules for text-to-image synthesis. To accurately depict and design scenes with multiple occluded objects, we design a pre-trained ordering recovery model and a generative adversarial network to predict layout and composite novel box lunch presentations. In the experiments, we devise the Bento800 dataset to evaluate the performance of the text-to-image synthesis model and the layout generation & image composition model. This paper is the continuation of our previous paper works. We also present additional experiments and qualitative performance comparisons to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Bento800 dataset is available at https://github.com/Yutong-Zhou-cv/Bento800_Dataset
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 that VPEval provides a more human-correlated evaluation for skill-specific and open-ended prompts than widely used single model-based evaluation. We hope that our work encourages future progress on interpretable/explainable generation and evaluation for T2I models.
Automatic layout generation that can synthesize high-quality layouts is an important tool for graphic design in many applications. Though existing methods based on generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) have progressed, they still leave much room for improving the quality and diversity of the results. Inspired by the recent success of diffusion models in generating high-quality images, this paper explores their potential for conditional layout generation and proposes Transformer-based Layout Diffusion Model (LayoutDM) by instantiating the conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) with a purely transformer-based architecture. Instead of using convolutional neural networks, a transformer-based conditional Layout Denoiser is proposed to learn the reverse diffusion process to generate samples from noised layout data. Benefitting from both transformer and DDPM, our LayoutDM is of desired properties such as high-quality generation, strong sample diversity, faithful distribution coverage, and stationary training in comparison to GANs and VAEs. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art generative models in terms of quality and diversity.
Sketching out Graphical User Interface (GUI) layout is part of the pipeline of designing a GUI and a crucial task for the success of a software application. Arranging all components inside a GUI layout manually is a time-consuming task. In order to assist designers, we developed a method named GUILGET to automatically generate GUI layouts from positional constraints represented as GUI arrangement graphs (GUI-AGs). The goal is to support the initial step of GUI design by producing realistic and diverse GUI layouts. The existing image layout generation techniques often cannot incorporate GUI design constraints. Thus, GUILGET needs to adapt existing techniques to generate GUI layouts that obey to constraints specific to GUI designs. GUILGET is based on transformers in order to capture the semantic in relationships between elements from GUI-AG. Moreover, the model learns constraints through the minimization of losses responsible for placing each component inside its parent layout, for not letting components overlap if they are inside the same parent, and for component alignment. Our experiments, which are conducted on the CLAY dataset, reveal that our model has the best understanding of relationships from GUI-AG and has the best performances in most of evaluation metrics. Therefore, our work contributes to improved GUI layout generation by proposing a novel method that effectively accounts for the constraints on GUI elements and paves the road for a more efficient GUI design pipeline.
Layout is essential for graphic design and poster generation. Recently, applying deep learning models to generate layouts has attracted increasing attention. This paper focuses on using the GAN-based model conditioned on image contents to generate advertising poster graphic layouts, which requires an advertising poster layout dataset with paired product images and graphic layouts. However, the paired images and layouts in the existing dataset are collected by inpainting and annotating posters, respectively. There exists a domain gap between inpainted posters (source domain data) and clean product images (target domain data). Therefore, this paper combines unsupervised domain adaption techniques to design a GAN with a novel pixel-level discriminator (PD), called PDA-GAN, to generate graphic layouts according to image contents. The PD is connected to the shallow level feature map and computes the GAN loss for each input-image pixel. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that PDA-GAN can achieve state-of-the-art performances and generate high-quality image-aware graphic layouts for advertising posters.
Creating graphic layouts is a fundamental step in graphic designs. In this work, we present a novel generative model named LayoutDiffusion for automatic layout generation. As layout is typically represented as a sequence of discrete tokens, LayoutDiffusion models layout generation as a discrete denoising diffusion process. It learns to reverse a mild forward process, in which layouts become increasingly chaotic with the growth of forward steps and layouts in the neighboring steps do not differ too much. Designing such a mild forward process is however very challenging as layout has both categorical attributes and ordinal attributes. To tackle the challenge, we summarize three critical factors for achieving a mild forward process for the layout, i.e., legality, coordinate proximity and type disruption. Based on the factors, we propose a block-wise transition matrix coupled with a piece-wise linear noise schedule. Experiments on RICO and PubLayNet datasets show that LayoutDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art approaches significantly. Moreover, it enables two conditional layout generation tasks in a plug-and-play manner without re-training and achieves better performance than existing methods.
We develop a diffusion-based approach for various document layout sequence generation. Layout sequences specify the contents of a document design in an explicit format. Our novel diffusion-based approach works in the sequence domain rather than the image domain in order to permit more complex and realistic layouts. We also introduce a new metric, Document Earth Mover's Distance (Doc-EMD). By considering similarity between heterogeneous categories document designs, we handle the shortcomings of prior document metrics that only evaluate the same category of layouts. Our empirical analysis shows that our diffusion-based approach is comparable to or outperforming other previous methods for layout generation across various document datasets. Moreover, our metric is capable of differentiating documents better than previous metrics for specific cases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Designing visually appealing layouts for multimedia documents containing text, graphs and images requires a form of creative intelligence. Modelling the generation of layouts has recently gained attention due to its importance in aesthetics and communication style. In contrast to standard prediction tasks, there are a range of acceptable layouts which depend on user preferences. For example, a poster designer may prefer logos on the top-left while another prefers logos on the bottom-right. Both are correct choices yet existing machine learning models treat layouts as a single choice prediction problem. In such situations, these models would simply average over all possible choices given the same input forming a degenerate sample. In the above example, this would form an unacceptable layout with a logo in the centre. In this paper, we present an auto-regressive neural network architecture, called LayoutMCL, that uses multi-choice prediction and winner-takes-all loss to effectively stabilise layout generation. LayoutMCL avoids the averaging problem by using multiple predictors to learn a range of possible options for each layout object. This enables LayoutMCL to generate multiple and diverse layouts from a single input which is in contrast with existing approaches which yield similar layouts with minor variations. Through quantitative benchmarks on real data (magazine, document and mobile app layouts), we demonstrate that LayoutMCL reduces Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) by 83-98% and generates significantly more diversity in comparison to existing approaches.