Daily Papers

Long-horizon agentic reasoning necessitates effectively compressing growing interaction histories into a limited context window. Most existing memory systems serialize history as text, where token-level cost is uniform and scales linearly with length, often spending scarce budget on low-value details. To this end, we introduce MemOCR, a multimodal memory agent that improves long-horizon reasoning under tight context budgets by allocating memory space with adaptive information density through visual layout. Concretely, MemOCR maintains a structured rich-text memory (e.g., headings, highlights) and renders it into an image that the agent consults for memory access, visually prioritizing crucial evidence while aggressively compressing auxiliary details. To ensure robustness across varying memory budgets, we train MemOCR with reinforcement learning under budget-aware objectives that expose the agent to diverse compression levels. Across long-context multi-hop and single-hop question-answering benchmarks, MemOCR outperforms strong text-based baselines and achieves more effective context utilization under extreme budgets.

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

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

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

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

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

Text Summarization is a popular task and an active area of research for the Natural Language Processing community. By definition, it requires to account for long input texts, a characteristic which poses computational challenges for neural models. Moreover, real-world documents come in a variety of complex, visually-rich, layouts. This information is of great relevance, whether to highlight salient content or to encode long-range interactions between textual passages. Yet, all publicly available summarization datasets only provide plain text content. To facilitate research on how to exploit visual/layout information to better capture long-range dependencies in summarization models, we present LoRaLay, a collection of datasets for long-range summarization with accompanying visual/layout information. We extend existing and popular English datasets (arXiv and PubMed) with layout information and propose four novel datasets -- consistently built from scholar resources -- covering French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean languages. Further, we propose new baselines merging layout-aware and long-range models -- two orthogonal approaches -- and obtain state-of-the-art results, showing the importance of combining both lines of research.

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

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in interpreting visual layouts and text. However, a significant challenge remains in their ability to interpret robustly and reason over multi-tabular data presented as images, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios like web pages and digital documents. Existing benchmarks typically address single tables or non-visual data (text/structured). This leaves a critical gap: they don't assess the ability to parse diverse table images, correlate information across them, and perform multi-hop reasoning on the combined visual data. We introduce MTabVQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed for multi-tabular visual question answering to bridge that gap. MTabVQA comprises 3,745 complex question-answer pairs that necessitate multi-hop reasoning across several visually rendered table images. We provide extensive benchmark results for state-of-the-art VLMs on MTabVQA, revealing significant performance limitations. We further investigate post-training techniques to enhance these reasoning abilities and release MTabVQA-Instruct, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset. Our experiments show that fine-tuning VLMs with MTabVQA-Instruct substantially improves their performance on visual multi-tabular reasoning. Code and dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/mtabvqa/MTabVQA-Eval) are available online (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MTabVQA-EMNLP-B16E).

Chart understanding is crucial for deploying multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in real-world scenarios such as analyzing scientific papers and technical reports. Unlike natural images, charts pair a structured visual layout (spatial property) with an underlying data representation (textual property) -- grasping both is essential for precise, fine-grained chart reasoning. Motivated by this observation, we propose START, the Spatial and Textual learning for chART understanding. Specifically, we introduce (i) chart-element grounding and (ii) chart-to-code generation to strengthen an MLLM's understanding of both chart visual layout and data details. To facilitate spatial and textual learning, we propose the START-Dataset generated with a novel data-generation pipeline that first leverages an MLLM to translate real chart images into executable chart code, recovering the underlying data representation while preserving the visual distribution of real-world charts. We then evolve the code with a Large Language Model (LLM) to ascertain the positions of chart elements that capture the chart's visual structure, addressing challenges that existing methods cannot handle. To evaluate a model's ability to understand chart spatial structures, we propose the Chart Spatial understanding Benchmark (CS-Bench), filling a critical gap in comprehensive chart understanding evaluation. Leveraging spatial and textual learning, START delivers consistent gains across model sizes and benchmarks over the base models and surpasses prior state-of-the-art by a clear margin. Code, data and models will be publicly available.

The evolution of text to visual components facilitates people's daily lives, such as generating image, videos from text and identifying the desired elements within the images. Computer vision models involving the multimodal abilities in the previous days are focused on image detection, classification based on well-defined objects. Large language models (LLMs) introduces the transformation from nature language to visual objects, which present the visual layout for text contexts. OpenAI GPT-4 has emerged as the pinnacle in LLMs, while the computer vision (CV) domain boasts a plethora of state-of-the-art (SOTA) models and algorithms to convert 2D images to their 3D representations. However, the mismatching between the algorithms with the problem could lead to undesired results. In response to this challenge, we propose an unified VisionGPT-3D framework to consolidate the state-of-the-art vision models, thereby facilitating the development of vision-oriented AI. VisionGPT-3D provides a versatile multimodal framework building upon the strengths of multimodal foundation models. It seamlessly integrates various SOTA vision models and brings the automation in the selection of SOTA vision models, identifies the suitable 3D mesh creation algorithms corresponding to 2D depth maps analysis, generates optimal results based on diverse multimodal inputs such as text prompts. Keywords: VisionGPT-3D, 3D vision understanding, Multimodal agent

PDF documents have the potential to provide trillions of novel, high-quality tokens for training language models. However, these documents come in a diversity of types with differing formats and visual layouts that pose a challenge when attempting to extract and faithfully represent the underlying content for language model use. We present olmOCR, an open-source Python toolkit for processing PDFs into clean, linearized plain text in natural reading order while preserving structured content like sections, tables, lists, equations, and more. Our toolkit runs a fine-tuned 7B vision language model (VLM) trained on a sample of 260,000 pages from over 100,000 crawled PDFs with diverse properties, including graphics, handwritten text and poor quality scans. olmOCR is optimized for large-scale batch processing, able to scale flexibly to different hardware setups and convert a million PDF pages for only $190 USD. We release all components of olmOCR including VLM weights, data and training code, as well as inference code built on serving frameworks including vLLM and SGLang.

Recent studies on machine reading comprehension have focused on text-level understanding but have not yet reached the level of human understanding of the visual layout and content of real-world documents. In this study, we introduce a new visual machine reading comprehension dataset, named VisualMRC, wherein given a question and a document image, a machine reads and comprehends texts in the image to answer the question in natural language. Compared with existing visual question answering (VQA) datasets that contain texts in images, VisualMRC focuses more on developing natural language understanding and generation abilities. It contains 30,000+ pairs of a question and an abstractive answer for 10,000+ document images sourced from multiple domains of webpages. We also introduce a new model that extends existing sequence-to-sequence models, pre-trained with large-scale text corpora, to take into account the visual layout and content of documents. Experiments with VisualMRC show that this model outperformed the base sequence-to-sequence models and a state-of-the-art VQA model. However, its performance is still below that of humans on most automatic evaluation metrics. The dataset will facilitate research aimed at connecting vision and language understanding.

Retrieval over visually rich documents is essential for tasks such as legal discovery, scientific search, and enterprise knowledge management. Existing approaches fall into two paradigms: single-vector retrieval, which is efficient but coarse, and multi-vector retrieval, which is accurate but computationally expensive. To address this trade-off, we propose HEAVEN, a two-stage hybrid-vector framework. In the first stage, HEAVEN efficiently retrieves candidate pages using a single-vector method over Visually-Summarized Pages (VS-Pages), which assemble representative visual layouts from multiple pages. In the second stage, it reranks candidates with a multi-vector method while filtering query tokens by linguistic importance to reduce redundant computations. To evaluate retrieval systems under realistic conditions, we also introduce ViMDOC, the first benchmark for visually rich, multi-document, and long-document retrieval. Across four benchmarks, HEAVEN attains 99.87% of the Recall@1 performance of multi-vector models on average while reducing per-query computation by 99.82%, achieving efficiency and accuracy. Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/juyeonnn/HEAVEN

Image editing with natural language has gained significant popularity, yet existing methods struggle with intricate object intersections and fine-grained spatial relationships due to the lack of an explicit reasoning process. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been explored to enhance reasoning, purely textual CoT or CoT augmented with coordinate information is fundamentally limited in its ability to represent intricate visual layouts and lacks the necessary visual cues to guide the generation of fine-grained, pixel-level details. To address these challenges, we propose Multimodal Reasoning Edit (MURE), a novel framework that shifts the visual editing process from purely text-based reasoning to a series of interleaved textual and visual rationales. Our framework performs image editing using a natively multimodal, interleaved text-image CoT. This approach generates a step-by-step chain of reasoning where a textual description is followed by a corresponding visual cue, such as a positional mask that defined intended edited regions or a representation of new content. Furthermore, to mitigate the hallucination phenomenon of large language models, we introduce Multimodal Deep Confidence (MMDC) reasoning paradigm. This paradigm explores a tree of visual reasoning paths at each step. By pruning low-quality branches using a deep confidence score from a reward model, it ensures the model consistently follows a high-quality trajectory towards the final edited result. The proposed method decomposes complex editing tasks into interdependent sub-tasks, achieving greater precision at each stage and yielding high-fidelity edited results. We define the formulation for interleaved text-image chains and release the first CoT-Edit-14K dataset, comprising 14K high-quality editing examples. Extensive experiments show that our method yields significant improvements across three image editing benchmarks.

Identity document (ID) image analysis has become essential for many online services, like bank account opening or insurance subscription. In recent years, much research has been conducted on subjects like document localization, text recognition and fraud detection, to achieve a level of accuracy reliable enough to automatize identity verification. However, there are only a few available datasets to benchmark ID analysis methods, mainly because of privacy restrictions, security requirements and legal reasons. In this paper, we present the DocXPand-25k dataset, which consists of 24,994 richly labeled IDs images, generated using custom-made vectorial templates representing nine fictitious ID designs, including four identity cards, two residence permits and three passports designs. These synthetic IDs feature artificially generated personal information (names, dates, identifiers, faces, barcodes, ...), and present a rich diversity in the visual layouts and textual contents. We collected about 5.8k diverse backgrounds coming from real-world photos, scans and screenshots of IDs to guarantee the variety of the backgrounds. The software we wrote to generate these images has been published (https://github.com/QuickSign/docxpand/) under the terms of the MIT license, and our dataset has been published (https://github.com/QuickSign/docxpand/releases/tag/v1.0.0) under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 License.

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

Visual question answering on document images that contain textual, visual, and layout information, called document VQA, has received much attention recently. Although many datasets have been proposed for developing document VQA systems, most of the existing datasets focus on understanding the content relationships within a single image and not across multiple images. In this study, we propose a new multi-image document VQA dataset, SlideVQA, containing 2.6k+ slide decks composed of 52k+ slide images and 14.5k questions about a slide deck. SlideVQA requires complex reasoning, including single-hop, multi-hop, and numerical reasoning, and also provides annotated arithmetic expressions of numerical answers for enhancing the ability of numerical reasoning. Moreover, we developed a new end-to-end document VQA model that treats evidence selection and question answering in a unified sequence-to-sequence format. Experiments on SlideVQA show that our model outperformed existing state-of-the-art QA models, but that it still has a large gap behind human performance. We believe that our dataset will facilitate research on document VQA.

Recently, various multimodal networks for Visually-Rich Document Understanding(VRDU) have been proposed, showing the promotion of transformers by integrating visual and layout information with the text embeddings. However, most existing approaches utilize the position embeddings to incorporate the sequence information, neglecting the noisy improper reading order obtained by OCR tools. In this paper, we propose a robust layout-aware multimodal network named XYLayoutLM to capture and leverage rich layout information from proper reading orders produced by our Augmented XY Cut. Moreover, a Dilated Conditional Position Encoding module is proposed to deal with the input sequence of variable lengths, and it additionally extracts local layout information from both textual and visual modalities while generating position embeddings. Experiment results show that our XYLayoutLM achieves competitive results on document understanding tasks.

Document structure editing involves manipulating localized textual, visual, and layout components in document images based on the user's requests. Past works have shown that multimodal grounding of user requests in the document image and identifying the accurate structural components and their associated attributes remain key challenges for this task. To address these, we introduce the DocEdit-v2, a novel framework that performs end-to-end document editing by leveraging Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). It consists of three novel components: (1) Doc2Command, which simultaneously localizes edit regions of interest (RoI) and disambiguates user edit requests into edit commands; (2) LLM-based Command Reformulation prompting to tailor edit commands originally intended for specialized software into edit instructions suitable for generalist LMMs. (3) Moreover, DocEdit-v2 processes these outputs via Large Multimodal Models like GPT-4V and Gemini, to parse the document layout, execute edits on grounded Region of Interest (RoI), and generate the edited document image. Extensive experiments on the DocEdit dataset show that DocEdit-v2 significantly outperforms strong baselines on edit command generation (2-33%), RoI bounding box detection (12-31%), and overall document editing (1-12\%) tasks.

Invoices and receipts submitted by employees are visually rich documents (VRDs) with textual, visual and layout information. To protect against the risk of fraud and abuse, it is crucial for organizations to efficiently extract desired information from submitted receipts. This helps in the assessment of key factors such as appropriateness of the expense claim, adherence to spending and transaction policies, the validity of the receipt, as well as downstream anomaly detection at various levels. These documents are heterogeneous, with multiple formats and languages, uploaded with different image qualities, and often do not contain ground truth labels for the efficient training of models. In this paper we propose Task Aware Instruction-based Labelling (TAIL), a method for synthetic label generation in VRD corpuses without labels, and fine-tune a multimodal Visually Rich Document Understanding Model (VRDU) on TAIL labels using response-based knowledge distillation without using the teacher model's weights or training dataset to conditionally generate annotations in the appropriate format. Using a benchmark external dataset where ground truth labels are available, we demonstrate conditions under which our approach performs at par with Claude 3 Sonnet through empirical studies. We then show that the resulting model performs at par or better on the internal expense documents of a large multinational organization than state-of-the-art LMM (large multimodal model) Claude 3 Sonnet while being 85% less costly and ~5X faster, and outperforms layout-aware baselines by more than 10% in Average Normalized Levenshtein Similarity (ANLS) scores due to its ability to reason and extract information from rare formats. Finally, we illustrate the usage of our approach in overpayment prevention.

Understanding domain-specific theorems often requires more than just text-based reasoning; effective communication through structured visual explanations is crucial for deeper comprehension. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance in text-based theorem reasoning, their ability to generate coherent and pedagogically meaningful visual explanations remains an open challenge. In this work, we introduce TheoremExplainAgent, an agentic approach for generating long-form theorem explanation videos (over 5 minutes) using Manim animations. To systematically evaluate multimodal theorem explanations, we propose TheoremExplainBench, a benchmark covering 240 theorems across multiple STEM disciplines, along with 5 automated evaluation metrics. Our results reveal that agentic planning is essential for generating detailed long-form videos, and the o3-mini agent achieves a success rate of 93.8% and an overall score of 0.77. However, our quantitative and qualitative studies show that most of the videos produced exhibit minor issues with visual element layout. Furthermore, multimodal explanations expose deeper reasoning flaws that text-based explanations fail to reveal, highlighting the importance of multimodal explanations.

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.

As convolution has empowered many smart applications, dynamic convolution further equips it with the ability to adapt to diverse inputs. However, the static and dynamic convolutions are either layout-agnostic or computation-heavy, making it inappropriate for layout-specific applications, e.g., face recognition and medical image segmentation. We observe that these applications naturally exhibit the characteristics of large intra-image (spatial) variance and small cross-image variance. This observation motivates our efficient translation variant convolution (TVConv) for layout-aware visual processing. Technically, TVConv is composed of affinity maps and a weight-generating block. While affinity maps depict pixel-paired relationships gracefully, the weight-generating block can be explicitly overparameterized for better training while maintaining efficient inference. Although conceptually simple, TVConv significantly improves the efficiency of the convolution and can be readily plugged into various network architectures. Extensive experiments on face recognition show that TVConv reduces the computational cost by up to 3.1x and improves the corresponding throughput by 2.3x while maintaining a high accuracy compared to the depthwise convolution. Moreover, for the same computation cost, we boost the mean accuracy by up to 4.21%. We also conduct experiments on the optic disc/cup segmentation task and obtain better generalization performance, which helps mitigate the critical data scarcity issue. Code is available at https://github.com/JierunChen/TVConv.

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

Pre-training techniques have been verified successfully in a variety of NLP tasks in recent years. Despite the widespread use of pre-training models for NLP applications, they almost exclusively focus on text-level manipulation, while neglecting layout and style information that is vital for document image understanding. In this paper, we propose the LayoutLM to jointly model interactions between text and layout information across scanned document images, which is beneficial for a great number of real-world document image understanding tasks such as information extraction from scanned documents. Furthermore, we also leverage image features to incorporate words' visual information into LayoutLM. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that text and layout are jointly learned in a single framework for document-level pre-training. It achieves new state-of-the-art results in several downstream tasks, including form understanding (from 70.72 to 79.27), receipt understanding (from 94.02 to 95.24) and document image classification (from 93.07 to 94.42). The code and pre-trained LayoutLM models are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutlm.

Automating the transformation of user interface (UI) designs into front-end code holds significant promise for accelerating software development and democratizing design workflows. While recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated progress in text-to-code generation, many existing approaches rely solely on natural language prompts, limiting their effectiveness in capturing spatial layout and visual design intent. In contrast, UI development in practice is inherently multimodal, often starting from visual sketches or mockups. To address this gap, we introduce a modular multi-agent framework that performs UI-to-code generation in three interpretable stages: grounding, planning, and generation. The grounding agent uses a vision-language model to detect and label UI components, the planning agent constructs a hierarchical layout using front-end engineering priors, and the generation agent produces HTML/CSS code via adaptive prompt-based synthesis. This design improves robustness, interpretability, and fidelity over end-to-end black-box methods. Furthermore, we extend the framework into a scalable data engine that automatically produces large-scale image-code pairs. Using these synthetic examples, we fine-tune and reinforce an open-source VLM, yielding notable gains in UI understanding and code quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in layout accuracy, structural coherence, and code correctness. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/leigest519/ScreenCoder.

Document retrieval is an important task for search and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. Large Language Models (LLMs) have contributed to improving the accuracy of text-based document retrieval. However, documents with complex layout and visual elements like tables, charts and infographics are not perfectly represented in textual format. Recently, image-based document retrieval pipelines have become popular, which use visual large language models (VLMs) to retrieve relevant page images given a query. Current evaluation benchmarks on visual document retrieval are limited, as they primarily focus only English language, rely on synthetically generated questions and offer a small corpus size. Therefore, we introduce MIRACL-VISION, a multilingual visual document retrieval evaluation benchmark. MIRACL-VISION covers 18 languages, and is an extension of the MIRACL dataset, a popular benchmark to evaluate text-based multilingual retrieval pipelines. MIRACL was built using a human-intensive annotation process to generate high-quality questions. In order to reduce MIRACL-VISION corpus size to make evaluation more compute friendly while keeping the datasets challenging, we have designed a method for eliminating the "easy" negatives from the corpus. We conducted extensive experiments comparing MIRACL-VISION with other benchmarks, using popular public text and image models. We observe a gap in state-of-the-art VLM-based embedding models on multilingual capabilities, with up to 59.7% lower retrieval accuracy than a text-based retrieval models. Even for the English language, the visual models retrieval accuracy is 12.1% lower compared to text-based models. MIRACL-VISION is a challenging, representative, multilingual evaluation benchmark for visual retrieval pipelines and will help the community build robust models for document retrieval.

Humans can flexibly switch between different modes of thinking based on task complexity: from rapid intuitive judgments to in-depth analytical understanding. However, current Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding systems which locate interface elements based on natural language instructions rely solely on immediate prediction without reasoning, struggling to understand complex interface layouts with nested structures and hierarchical relationships, limiting their effectiveness on complex interfaces. Inspired by human dual-system cognition, we present Focus, a novel GUI grounding framework that combines fast prediction with systematic analysis. The framework dynamically switches between rapid and deliberate processing through an adaptive system switching based on task complexity, optimizing both efficiency and accuracy. Focus decomposes grounding into progressive stages: interface summarization, visual focused analysis, and precise coordinate prediction. This structured decomposition enables systematic understanding of both interface layouts and visual relationships. Extensive experiments show that Focus achieves state-of-the-art performance using only 300K of the training data with a 2B parameter model compared to existing approaches. Focus demonstrates superior performance particularly in complex GUI scenarios, achieving 77.4% average accuracy on ScreenSpot and 13.3% on the more challenging ScreenSpot-Pro. Our analysis reveals the effectiveness of this dual-system approach while demonstrating its potential for improving complex GUI interaction scenarios.

We propose spatially-adaptive normalization, a simple but effective layer for synthesizing photorealistic images given an input semantic layout. Previous methods directly feed the semantic layout as input to the deep network, which is then processed through stacks of convolution, normalization, and nonlinearity layers. We show that this is suboptimal as the normalization layers tend to ``wash away'' semantic information. To address the issue, we propose using the input layout for modulating the activations in normalization layers through a spatially-adaptive, learned transformation. Experiments on several challenging datasets demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over existing approaches, regarding both visual fidelity and alignment with input layouts. Finally, our model allows user control over both semantic and style. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/SPADE .

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

Recently, remarkable progress has been made in Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs), which integrate vision-language generation and understanding capabilities within a single framework. However, a significant gap exists where a model's strong visual understanding often fails to transfer to its visual generation. A model might correctly understand an image based on user instructions, yet be unable to generate a faithful image from text prompts. This phenomenon directly raises a compelling question: Can a model achieve self-improvement by using its understanding module to reward its generation module? To bridge this gap and achieve self-improvement, we introduce SRUM, a self-rewarding post-training framework that can be directly applied to existing UMMs of various designs. SRUM creates a feedback loop where the model's own understanding module acts as an internal ``evaluator'', providing corrective signals to improve its generation module, without requiring additional human-labeled data. To ensure this feedback is comprehensive, we designed a global-local dual reward system. To tackle the inherent structural complexity of images, this system offers multi-scale guidance: a global reward ensures the correctness of the overall visual semantics and layout, while a local reward refines fine-grained, object-level fidelity. SRUM leads to powerful capabilities and shows strong generalization, boosting performance on T2I-CompBench from 82.18 to 88.37 and on T2I-ReasonBench from 43.82 to 46.75. Overall, our work establishes a powerful new paradigm for enabling a UMMs' understanding module to guide and enhance its own generation via self-rewarding.

Document Visual Question Answering (VQA) aims to understand visually-rich documents to answer questions in natural language, which is an emerging research topic for both Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. In this work, we introduce a new Document VQA dataset, named TAT-DQA, which consists of 3,067 document pages comprising semi-structured table(s) and unstructured text as well as 16,558 question-answer pairs by extending the TAT-QA dataset. These documents are sampled from real-world financial reports and contain lots of numbers, which means discrete reasoning capability is demanded to answer questions on this dataset. Based on TAT-DQA, we further develop a novel model named MHST that takes into account the information in multi-modalities, including text, layout and visual image, to intelligently address different types of questions with corresponding strategies, i.e., extraction or reasoning. Extensive experiments show that the MHST model significantly outperforms the baseline methods, demonstrating its effectiveness. However, the performance still lags far behind that of expert humans. We expect that our new TAT-DQA dataset would facilitate the research on deep understanding of visually-rich documents combining vision and language, especially for scenarios that require discrete reasoning. Also, we hope the proposed model would inspire researchers to design more advanced Document VQA models in future. Our dataset will be publicly available for non-commercial use at https://nextplusplus.github.io/TAT-DQA/.

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.

With the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), rich document analysis technologies for applications like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and visual RAG are gaining significant attention. Recent research indicates that using VLMs can achieve better RAG performance, but processing rich documents still remains a challenge since a single page contains large amounts of information. In this paper, we present SCAN (SemantiC Document Layout ANalysis), a novel approach enhancing both textual and visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems working with visually rich documents. It is a VLM-friendly approach that identifies document components with appropriate semantic granularity, balancing context preservation with processing efficiency. SCAN uses a coarse-grained semantic approach that divides documents into coherent regions covering continuous components. We trained the SCAN model by fine-tuning object detection models with sophisticated annotation datasets. Our experimental results across English and Japanese datasets demonstrate that applying SCAN improves end-to-end textual RAG performance by up to 9.0\% and visual RAG performance by up to 6.4\%, outperforming conventional approaches and even commercial document processing solutions.

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

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.

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

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

Open-universe 3D layout generation arranges unlabeled 3D assets conditioned on language instruction. Large language models (LLMs) struggle with generating physically plausible 3D scenes and adherence to input instructions, particularly in cluttered scenes. We introduce LayoutVLM, a framework and scene layout representation that exploits the semantic knowledge of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and supports differentiable optimization to ensure physical plausibility. LayoutVLM employs VLMs to generate two mutually reinforcing representations from visually marked images, and a self-consistent decoding process to improve VLMs spatial planning. Our experiments show that LayoutVLM addresses the limitations of existing LLM and constraint-based approaches, producing physically plausible 3D layouts better aligned with the semantic intent of input language instructions. We also demonstrate that fine-tuning VLMs with the proposed scene layout representation extracted from existing scene datasets can improve performance.

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

Despite the remarkable progress in text-to-video models, achieving precise control over text elements and animated graphics remains a significant challenge, especially in applications such as video advertisements. To address this limitation, we introduce Animated Layout Generation, a novel approach to extend static graphic layouts with temporal dynamics. We propose a Structured Text Representation for fine-grained video control through hierarchical visual elements. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we present VAKER (Video Ad maKER), a text-to-video advertisement generation pipeline that combines a three-stage generation process with Unstructured Text Reasoning for seamless integration with LLMs. VAKER fully automates video advertisement generation by incorporating dynamic layout trajectories for objects and graphics across specific video frames. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that VAKER significantly outperforms existing methods in generating video advertisements. Project Page: https://yeonsangshin.github.io/projects/Vaker

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

Generating artistic and coherent 3D scene layouts is crucial in digital content creation. Traditional optimization-based methods are often constrained by cumbersome manual rules, while deep generative models face challenges in producing content with richness and diversity. Furthermore, approaches that utilize large language models frequently lack robustness and fail to accurately capture complex spatial relationships. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel vision-guided 3D layout generation system. We first construct a high-quality asset library containing 2,037 scene assets and 147 3D scene layouts. Subsequently, we employ an image generation model to expand prompt representations into images, fine-tuning it to align with our asset library. We then develop a robust image parsing module to recover the 3D layout of scenes based on visual semantics and geometric information. Finally, we optimize the scene layout using scene graphs and overall visual semantics to ensure logical coherence and alignment with the images. Extensive user testing demonstrates that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of layout richness and quality. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/HiHiAllen/Imaginarium.

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

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.

Enterprise documents such as forms, invoices, receipts, reports, contracts, and other similar records, often carry rich semantics at the intersection of textual and spatial modalities. The visual cues offered by their complex layouts play a crucial role in comprehending these documents effectively. In this paper, we present DocLLM, a lightweight extension to traditional large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over visual documents, taking into account both textual semantics and spatial layout. Our model differs from existing multimodal LLMs by avoiding expensive image encoders and focuses exclusively on bounding box information to incorporate the spatial layout structure. Specifically, the cross-alignment between text and spatial modalities is captured by decomposing the attention mechanism in classical transformers to a set of disentangled matrices. Furthermore, we devise a pre-training objective that learns to infill text segments. This approach allows us to address irregular layouts and heterogeneous content frequently encountered in visual documents. The pre-trained model is fine-tuned using a large-scale instruction dataset, covering four core document intelligence tasks. We demonstrate that our solution outperforms SotA LLMs on 14 out of 16 datasets across all tasks, and generalizes well to 4 out of 5 previously unseen datasets.

Visual reasoning over structured data such as tables is a critical capability for modern vision-language models (VLMs), yet current benchmarks remain limited in scale, diversity, or reasoning depth, especially when it comes to rendered table images. Addressing this gap, we introduce Visual-TableQA, a large-scale, open-domain multimodal dataset specifically designed to evaluate and enhance visual reasoning over complex tabular data. Our generation pipeline is modular, scalable, and fully autonomous, involving multiple reasoning LLMs collaborating across distinct roles: generation, validation, and inspiration. Visual-TableQA comprises 2.5k richly structured LaTeX-rendered tables and 6k reasoning-intensive QA pairs, all produced at a cost of under USD 100. To promote diversity and creativity, our pipeline performs multi-model collaborative data generation via cross-model prompting ('inspiration') and LLM-jury filtering. Stronger models seed layouts and topics that weaker models elaborate, collectively distilling diverse reasoning patterns and visual structures into the dataset. Empirical results show that models fine-tuned on Visual-TableQA generalize robustly to external benchmarks, outperforming several proprietary models despite the dataset's synthetic nature. The full pipeline and resources are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-4-Everyone/Visual-TableQA.

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 .

Indoor scene synthesis involves automatically picking and placing furniture appropriately on a floor plan, so that the scene looks realistic and is functionally plausible. Such scenes can serve as homes for immersive 3D experiences, or be used to train embodied agents. Existing methods for this task rely on labeled categories of furniture, e.g. bed, chair or table, to generate contextually relevant combinations of furniture. Whether heuristic or learned, these methods ignore instance-level visual attributes of objects, and as a result may produce visually less coherent scenes. In this paper, we introduce an auto-regressive scene model which can output instance-level predictions, using general purpose image embedding based on CLIP. This allows us to learn visual correspondences such as matching color and style, and produce more functionally plausible and aesthetically pleasing scenes. Evaluated on the 3D-FRONT dataset, our model achieves SOTA results in scene synthesis and improves auto-completion metrics by over 50%. Moreover, our embedding-based approach enables zero-shot text-guided scene synthesis and editing, which easily generalizes to furniture not seen during training.

Graphic design forms the cornerstone of modern visual communication, serving as a vital medium for promoting cultural and commercial events. Recent advances have explored automating this process using Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), yet existing methods often produce geometrically inaccurate layouts and lack the iterative, layer-specific editing required in professional workflows. To address these limitations, we present PosterCopilot, a framework that advances layout reasoning and controllable editing for professional graphic design. Specifically, we introduce a progressive three-stage training strategy that equips LMMs with geometric understanding and aesthetic reasoning for layout design, consisting of Perturbed Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning for Visual-Reality Alignment, and Reinforcement Learning from Aesthetic Feedback. Furthermore, we develop a complete workflow that couples the trained LMM-based design model with generative models, enabling layer-controllable, iterative editing for precise element refinement while maintaining global visual consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PosterCopilot achieves geometrically accurate and aesthetically superior layouts, offering unprecedented controllability for professional iterative design.

Recently, state-of-the-art text-to-image generation models, such as Flux and Ideogram 2.0, have made significant progress in sentence-level visual text rendering. In this paper, we focus on the more challenging scenarios of article-level visual text rendering and address a novel task of generating high-quality business content, including infographics and slides, based on user provided article-level descriptive prompts and ultra-dense layouts. The fundamental challenges are twofold: significantly longer context lengths and the scarcity of high-quality business content data. In contrast to most previous works that focus on a limited number of sub-regions and sentence-level prompts, ensuring precise adherence to ultra-dense layouts with tens or even hundreds of sub-regions in business content is far more challenging. We make two key technical contributions: (i) the construction of scalable, high-quality business content dataset, i.e., Infographics-650K, equipped with ultra-dense layouts and prompts by implementing a layer-wise retrieval-augmented infographic generation scheme; and (ii) a layout-guided cross attention scheme, which injects tens of region-wise prompts into a set of cropped region latent space according to the ultra-dense layouts, and refine each sub-regions flexibly during inference using a layout conditional CFG. We demonstrate the strong results of our system compared to previous SOTA systems such as Flux and SD3 on our BizEval prompt set. Additionally, we conduct thorough ablation experiments to verify the effectiveness of each component. We hope our constructed Infographics-650K and BizEval can encourage the broader community to advance the progress of business content generation.

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

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

We propose a novel multimodal architecture for Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA), named Layout-Aware Transformer (LaTr). The task of STVQA requires models to reason over different modalities. Thus, we first investigate the impact of each modality, and reveal the importance of the language module, especially when enriched with layout information. Accounting for this, we propose a single objective pre-training scheme that requires only text and spatial cues. We show that applying this pre-training scheme on scanned documents has certain advantages over using natural images, despite the domain gap. Scanned documents are easy to procure, text-dense and have a variety of layouts, helping the model learn various spatial cues (e.g. left-of, below etc.) by tying together language and layout information. Compared to existing approaches, our method performs vocabulary-free decoding and, as shown, generalizes well beyond the training vocabulary. We further demonstrate that LaTr improves robustness towards OCR errors, a common reason for failure cases in STVQA. In addition, by leveraging a vision transformer, we eliminate the need for an external object detector. LaTr outperforms state-of-the-art STVQA methods on multiple datasets. In particular, +7.6% on TextVQA, +10.8% on ST-VQA and +4.0% on OCR-VQA (all absolute accuracy numbers).

We present DeepSeek-OCR 2 to investigate the feasibility of a novel encoder-DeepEncoder V2-capable of dynamically reordering visual tokens upon image semantics. Conventional vision-language models (VLMs) invariably process visual tokens in a rigid raster-scan order (top-left to bottom-right) with fixed positional encoding when fed into LLMs. However, this contradicts human visual perception, which follows flexible yet semantically coherent scanning patterns driven by inherent logical structures. Particularly for images with complex layouts, human vision exhibits causally-informed sequential processing. Inspired by this cognitive mechanism, DeepEncoder V2 is designed to endow the encoder with causal reasoning capabilities, enabling it to intelligently reorder visual tokens prior to LLM-based content interpretation. This work explores a novel paradigm: whether 2D image understanding can be effectively achieved through two-cascaded 1D causal reasoning structures, thereby offering a new architectural approach with the potential to achieve genuine 2D reasoning. Codes and model weights are publicly accessible at http://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR-2.

A visually rich document (VRD) utilizes visual features along with linguistic cues to disseminate information. Training a custom extractor that identifies named entities from a document requires a large number of instances of the target document type annotated at textual and visual modalities. This is an expensive bottleneck in enterprise scenarios, where we want to train custom extractors for thousands of different document types in a scalable way. Pre-training an extractor model on unlabeled instances of the target document type, followed by a fine-tuning step on human-labeled instances does not work in these scenarios, as it surpasses the maximum allowable training time allocated for the extractor. We address this scenario by proposing a Noise-Aware Training method or NAT in this paper. Instead of acquiring expensive human-labeled documents, NAT utilizes weakly labeled documents to train an extractor in a scalable way. To avoid degradation in the model's quality due to noisy, weakly labeled samples, NAT estimates the confidence of each training sample and incorporates it as uncertainty measure during training. We train multiple state-of-the-art extractor models using NAT. Experiments on a number of publicly available and in-house datasets show that NAT-trained models are not only robust in performance -- it outperforms a transfer-learning baseline by up to 6% in terms of macro-F1 score, but it is also more label-efficient -- it reduces the amount of human-effort required to obtain comparable performance by up to 73%.

Unified multimodal models that couple visual understanding with image generation have advanced rapidly, yet most systems still focus on visual grounding-aligning language with image regions-while their generative counterpart, linguistic-embedded layout-grounded generation (LELG) for layout-controllable multi-instance generation, remains underexplored and limits precise compositional control. We present ConsistCompose, a unified multimodal framework that embeds layout coordinates directly into language prompts, enabling layout-controlled multi-instance image generation from Interleaved Image-Text within a single generative interface. We further construct ConsistCompose3M, a 3.4M multi-instance generation dataset with layout and identity annotations (2.6M text-guided and 0.8M image-guided data pairs) that provides large-scale supervision for layout-conditioned generation. Within this framework, LELG is instantiated through instance-coordinate binding prompts and coordinate-aware classifier-free guidance, which translate linguistic layout cues into precise spatial control without task-specific branches. Experiments on COCO-Position and MS-Bench show that ConsistCompose substantially improves spatial accuracy over layout-controlled baselines while preserving identity fidelity and competitive general multimodal understanding, establishing a unified paradigm for layout-controllable multimodal image generation.

The advent of multimodal learning has brought a significant improvement in document AI. Documents are now treated as multimodal entities, incorporating both textual and visual information for downstream analysis. However, works in this space are often focused on the textual aspect, using the visual space as auxiliary information. While some works have explored pure vision based techniques for document image understanding, they require OCR identified text as input during inference, or do not align with text in their learning procedure. Therefore, we present a novel image-text alignment technique specially designed for leveraging the textual information in document images to improve performance on visual tasks. Our document encoder model DoPTA - trained with this technique demonstrates strong performance on a wide range of document image understanding tasks, without requiring OCR during inference. Combined with an auxiliary reconstruction objective, DoPTA consistently outperforms larger models, while using significantly lesser pre-training compute. DoPTA also sets new state-of-the art results on D4LA, and FUNSD, two challenging document visual analysis benchmarks.

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

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

We introduce FinCriticalED (Financial Critical Error Detection), a visual benchmark for evaluating OCR and vision language models on financial documents at the fact level. Financial documents contain visually dense and table heavy layouts where numerical and temporal information is tightly coupled with structure. In high stakes settings, small OCR mistakes such as sign inversion or shifted dates can lead to materially different interpretations, while traditional OCR metrics like ROUGE and edit distance capture only surface level text similarity. \ficriticaled provides 500 image-HTML pairs with expert annotated financial facts covering over seven hundred numerical and temporal facts. It introduces three key contributions. First, it establishes the first fact level evaluation benchmark for financial document understanding, shifting evaluation from lexical overlap to domain critical factual correctness. Second, all annotations are created and verified by financial experts with strict quality control over signs, magnitudes, and temporal expressions. Third, we develop an LLM-as-Judge evaluation pipeline that performs structured fact extraction and contextual verification for visually complex financial documents. We benchmark OCR systems, open source vision language models, and proprietary models on FinCriticalED. Results show that although the strongest proprietary models achieve the highest factual accuracy, substantial errors remain in visually intricate numerical and temporal contexts. Through quantitative evaluation and expert case studies, FinCriticalED provides a rigorous foundation for advancing visual factual precision in financial and other precision critical domains.

Recent advancements in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have enabled many applications in image editing. However, none of these methods have been able to edit the layout of single existing images. To address this gap, we propose the first framework for layout editing of a single image while preserving its visual properties, thus allowing for continuous editing on a single image. Our approach is achieved through two key modules. First, to preserve the characteristics of multiple objects within an image, we disentangle the concepts of different objects and embed them into separate textual tokens using a novel method called masked textual inversion. Next, we propose a training-free optimization method to perform layout control for a pre-trained diffusion model, which allows us to regenerate images with learned concepts and align them with user-specified layouts. As the first framework to edit the layout of existing images, we demonstrate that our method is effective and outperforms other baselines that were modified to support this task. Our code will be freely available for public use upon acceptance.

We introduce a method for composing object-level visual prompts within a text-to-image diffusion model. Our approach addresses the task of generating semantically coherent compositions across diverse scenes and styles, similar to the versatility and expressiveness offered by text prompts. A key challenge in this task is to preserve the identity of the objects depicted in the input visual prompts, while also generating diverse compositions across different images. To address this challenge, we introduce a new KV-mixed cross-attention mechanism, in which keys and values are learned from distinct visual representations. The keys are derived from an encoder with a small bottleneck for layout control, whereas the values come from a larger bottleneck encoder that captures fine-grained appearance details. By mixing keys and values from these complementary sources, our model preserves the identity of the visual prompts while supporting flexible variations in object arrangement, pose, and composition. During inference, we further propose object-level compositional guidance to improve the method's identity preservation and layout correctness. Results show that our technique produces diverse scene compositions that preserve the unique characteristics of each visual prompt, expanding the creative potential of text-to-image generation.

The robustness of a model for real-world deployment is decided by how well it performs on unseen data and distinguishes between in-domain and out-of-domain samples. Visual document classifiers have shown impressive performance on in-distribution test sets. However, they tend to have a hard time correctly classifying and differentiating out-of-distribution examples. Image-based classifiers lack the text component, whereas multi-modality transformer-based models face the token serialization problem in visual documents due to their diverse layouts. They also require a lot of computing power during inference, making them impractical for many real-world applications. We propose, GVdoc, a graph-based document classification model that addresses both of these challenges. Our approach generates a document graph based on its layout, and then trains a graph neural network to learn node and graph embeddings. Through experiments, we show that our model, even with fewer parameters, outperforms state-of-the-art models on out-of-distribution data while retaining comparable performance on the in-distribution test set.

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

Recent text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating high-resolution images from text but struggle with precise control over spatial composition and object counting. To address these challenges, several studies developed layout-to-image (L2I) approaches that incorporate layout instructions into text-to-image models. However, existing L2I methods typically require either fine-tuning pretrained parameters or training additional control modules for the diffusion models. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot L2I approach, BACON (Boundary Attention Constrained generation), which eliminates the need for additional modules or fine-tuning. Specifically, we use text-visual cross-attention feature maps to quantify inconsistencies between the layout of the generated images and the provided instructions, and then compute loss functions to optimize latent features during the diffusion reverse process. To enhance spatial controllability and mitigate semantic failures in complex layout instructions, we leverage pixel-to-pixel correlations in the self-attention feature maps to align cross-attention maps and combine three loss functions constrained by boundary attention to update latent features. Comprehensive experimental results on both L2I and non-L2I pretrained diffusion models demonstrate that our method outperforms existing zero-shot L2I techniuqes both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of image composition on the DrawBench and HRS benchmarks.

While diffusion models have significantly advanced the quality of image generation, their capability to accurately and coherently render text within these images remains a substantial challenge. Conventional diffusion-based methods for scene text generation are typically limited by their reliance on an intermediate layout output. This dependency often results in a constrained diversity of text styles and fonts, an inherent limitation stemming from the deterministic nature of the layout generation phase. To address these challenges, this paper introduces SceneTextGen, a novel diffusion-based model specifically designed to circumvent the need for a predefined layout stage. By doing so, SceneTextGen facilitates a more natural and varied representation of text. The novelty of SceneTextGen lies in its integration of three key components: a character-level encoder for capturing detailed typographic properties, coupled with a character-level instance segmentation model and a word-level spotting model to address the issues of unwanted text generation and minor character inaccuracies. We validate the performance of our method by demonstrating improved character recognition rates on generated images across different public visual text datasets in comparison to both standard diffusion based methods and text specific methods.

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.

With the remarkable recent progress on learning deep generative models, it becomes increasingly interesting to develop models for controllable image synthesis from reconfigurable inputs. This paper focuses on a recent emerged task, layout-to-image, to learn generative models that are capable of synthesizing photo-realistic images from spatial layout (i.e., object bounding boxes configured in an image lattice) and style (i.e., structural and appearance variations encoded by latent vectors). This paper first proposes an intuitive paradigm for the task, layout-to-mask-to-image, to learn to unfold object masks of given bounding boxes in an input layout to bridge the gap between the input layout and synthesized images. Then, this paper presents a method built on Generative Adversarial Networks for the proposed layout-to-mask-to-image with style control at both image and mask levels. Object masks are learned from the input layout and iteratively refined along stages in the generator network. Style control at the image level is the same as in vanilla GANs, while style control at the object mask level is realized by a proposed novel feature normalization scheme, Instance-Sensitive and Layout-Aware Normalization. In experiments, the proposed method is tested in the COCO-Stuff dataset and the Visual Genome dataset with state-of-the-art performance obtained.

Document Layout Analysis is crucial for real-world document understanding systems, but it encounters a challenging trade-off between speed and accuracy: multimodal methods leveraging both text and visual features achieve higher accuracy but suffer from significant latency, whereas unimodal methods relying solely on visual features offer faster processing speeds at the expense of accuracy. To address this dilemma, we introduce DocLayout-YOLO, a novel approach that enhances accuracy while maintaining speed advantages through document-specific optimizations in both pre-training and model design. For robust document pre-training, we introduce the Mesh-candidate BestFit algorithm, which frames document synthesis as a two-dimensional bin packing problem, generating the large-scale, diverse DocSynth-300K dataset. Pre-training on the resulting DocSynth-300K dataset significantly improves fine-tuning performance across various document types. In terms of model optimization, we propose a Global-to-Local Controllable Receptive Module that is capable of better handling multi-scale variations of document elements. Furthermore, to validate performance across different document types, we introduce a complex and challenging benchmark named DocStructBench. Extensive experiments on downstream datasets demonstrate that DocLayout-YOLO excels in both speed and accuracy. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/opendatalab/DocLayout-YOLO.

Creating high-fidelity 3D models of indoor environments is essential for applications in design, virtual reality, and robotics. However, manual 3D modeling remains time-consuming and labor-intensive. While recent advances in generative AI have enabled automated scene synthesis, existing methods often face challenges in balancing visual quality, diversity, semantic consistency, and user control. A major bottleneck is the lack of a large-scale, high-quality dataset tailored to this task. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive synthetic dataset, featuring 12,328 structured annotated scenes with 57,440 rooms, and 4.7M photorealistic 2D renderings. Leveraging this dataset, we present SpatialGen, a novel multi-view multi-modal diffusion model that generates realistic and semantically consistent 3D indoor scenes. Given a 3D layout and a reference image (derived from a text prompt), our model synthesizes appearance (color image), geometry (scene coordinate map), and semantic (semantic segmentation map) from arbitrary viewpoints, while preserving spatial consistency across modalities. SpatialGen consistently generates superior results to previous methods in our experiments. We are open-sourcing our data and models to empower the community and advance the field of indoor scene understanding and generation.

The creation of complex 3D scenes tailored to user specifications has been a tedious and challenging task with traditional 3D modeling tools. Although some pioneering methods have achieved automatic text-to-3D generation, they are generally limited to small-scale scenes with restricted control over the shape and texture. We introduce SceneCraft, a novel method for generating detailed indoor scenes that adhere to textual descriptions and spatial layout preferences provided by users. Central to our method is a rendering-based technique, which converts 3D semantic layouts into multi-view 2D proxy maps. Furthermore, we design a semantic and depth conditioned diffusion model to generate multi-view images, which are used to learn a neural radiance field (NeRF) as the final scene representation. Without the constraints of panorama image generation, we surpass previous methods in supporting complicated indoor space generation beyond a single room, even as complicated as a whole multi-bedroom apartment with irregular shapes and layouts. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in complex indoor scene generation with diverse textures, consistent geometry, and realistic visual quality. Code and more results are available at: https://orangesodahub.github.io/SceneCraft

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly depends on high-quality supervised data, yet existing instruction-tuning and RL datasets remain costly to curate and often rely on synthetic samples that introduce hallucination and limited diversity. At the same time, textbooks and exercise materials contain abundant, high-quality human-authored Question-Answer(QA) content that remains underexploited due to the difficulty of transforming raw PDFs into AI-ready supervision. Although modern OCR and vision-language models can accurately parse document structure, their outputs lack the semantic alignment required for training. We propose an automated pipeline that extracts well-formed QA and visual-QA (VQA) pairs from educational documents by combining layout-aware OCR with LLM-based semantic parsing. Experiments across diverse document types show that the method produces accurate, aligned, and low-noise QA/VQA pairs. This approach enables scalable use of real-world educational content and provides a practical alternative to synthetic data generation for improving reasoning-oriented LLM training. All code and data-processing pipelines are open-sourced at https://github.com/OpenDCAI/DataFlow.

Document layout understanding remains data-intensive despite advances in semi-supervised learning. We present a framework that enhances semi-supervised detection by fusing visual predictions with structural priors from text-pretrained LLMs via principled probabilistic weighting. Given unlabeled documents, an OCR-LLM pipeline infers hierarchical regions which are combined with teacher detector outputs through inverse-variance fusion to generate refined pseudo-labels.Our method demonstrates consistent gains across model scales. With a lightweight SwiftFormer backbone (26M params), we achieve 88.2pm0.3 AP using only 5\% labels on PubLayNet. When applied to document-pretrained LayoutLMv3 (133M params), our fusion framework reaches 89.7pm0.4 AP, surpassing both LayoutLMv3 with standard semi-supervised learning (89.1pm0.4 AP, p=0.02) and matching UDOP~udop (89.8 AP) which requires 100M+ pages of multimodal pretraining. This demonstrates that LLM structural priors are complementary to both lightweight and pretrained architectures. Key findings include: (1) learned instance-adaptive gating improves over fixed weights by +0.9 AP with data-dependent PAC bounds correctly predicting convergence; (2) open-source LLMs enable privacy-preserving deployment with minimal loss (Llama-3-70B: 87.1 AP lightweight, 89.4 AP with LayoutLMv3); (3) LLMs provide targeted semantic disambiguation (18.7\% of cases, +3.8 AP gain) beyond simple text heuristics.Total system cost includes \$12 for GPT-4o-mini API or 17 GPU-hours for local Llama-3-70B per 50K pages, amortized across training runs.

With the development of diffusion models, enhancing spatial controllability in text-to-image generation has become a vital challenge. As a representative task for addressing this challenge, layout-to-image generation aims to generate images that are spatially consistent with the given layout condition. Existing layout-to-image methods typically introduce the layout condition by integrating adapter modules into the base generative model. However, the generated images often exhibit low visual quality and stylistic inconsistency with the base model, indicating a loss of pretrained knowledge. To alleviate this issue, we construct the Layout Synthesis (LaySyn) dataset, which leverages images synthesized by the base model itself to mitigate the distribution shift from the pretraining data. Moreover, we propose the Layout Control (Laytrol) Network, in which parameters are inherited from MM-DiT to preserve the pretrained knowledge of the base model. To effectively activate the copied parameters and avoid disturbance from unstable control conditions, we adopt a dedicated initialization scheme for Laytrol. In this scheme, the layout encoder is initialized as a pure text encoder to ensure that its output tokens remain within the data domain of MM-DiT. Meanwhile, the outputs of the layout control network are initialized to zero. In addition, we apply Object-level Rotary Position Embedding to the layout tokens to provide coarse positional information. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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

Document images encapsulate a wealth of knowledge, while the portability of spoken queries enables broader and flexible application scenarios. Yet, no prior work has explored knowledge base question answering over visual document images with queries provided directly in speech. We propose TextlessRAG, the first end-to-end framework for speech-based question answering over large-scale document images. Unlike prior methods, TextlessRAG eliminates ASR, TTS and OCR, directly interpreting speech, retrieving relevant visual knowledge, and generating answers in a fully textless pipeline. To further boost performance, we integrate a layout-aware reranking mechanism to refine retrieval. Experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in both efficiency and accuracy. To advance research in this direction, we also release the first bilingual speech--document RAG dataset, featuring Chinese and English voice queries paired with multimodal document content. Both the dataset and our pipeline will be made available at repository:https://github.com/xiepeijinhit-hue/textlessrag

Layout-to-image (L2I) generation has exhibited promising results in natural domains, but suffers from limited generative fidelity and weak alignment with user-provided layouts when applied to degraded scenes (i.e., low-light, underwater). We primarily attribute these limitations to the "contextual illusion dilemma" in degraded conditions, where foreground instances are overwhelmed by context-dominant frequency distributions. Motivated by this, our paper proposes a new Frequency-Inspired Contextual Disentanglement Generative (FICGen) paradigm, which seeks to transfer frequency knowledge of degraded images into the latent diffusion space, thereby facilitating the rendering of degraded instances and their surroundings via contextual frequency-aware guidance. To be specific, FICGen consists of two major steps. Firstly, we introduce a learnable dual-query mechanism, each paired with a dedicated frequency resampler, to extract contextual frequency prototypes from pre-collected degraded exemplars in the training set. Secondly, a visual-frequency enhanced attention is employed to inject frequency prototypes into the degraded generation process. To alleviate the contextual illusion and attribute leakage, an instance coherence map is developed to regulate latent-space disentanglement between individual instances and their surroundings, coupled with an adaptive spatial-frequency aggregation module to reconstruct spatial-frequency mixed degraded representations. Extensive experiments on 5 benchmarks involving a variety of degraded scenarios-from severe low-light to mild blur-demonstrate that FICGen consistently surpasses existing L2I methods in terms of generative fidelity, alignment and downstream auxiliary trainability.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown impressive capabilities in generating realistic visuals from natural-language prompts, yet they often struggle with accurately binding attributes to corresponding objects, especially in prompts containing multiple attribute-object pairs. This challenge primarily arises from the limitations of commonly used text encoders, such as CLIP, which can fail to encode complex linguistic relationships and modifiers effectively. Existing approaches have attempted to mitigate these issues through attention map control during inference and the use of layout information or fine-tuning during training, yet they face performance drops with increased prompt complexity. In this work, we introduce a novel compositional generation method that leverages pairwise image embeddings to improve attribute-object binding. Our approach decomposes complex prompts into sub-prompts, generates corresponding images, and computes visual prototypes that fuse with text embeddings to enhance representation. By applying segmentation-based localization training, we address cross-attention misalignment, achieving improved accuracy in binding multiple attributes to objects. Our approaches outperform existing compositional text-to-image diffusion models on the benchmark T2I CompBench, achieving better image quality, evaluated by humans, and emerging robustness under scaling number of binding pairs in the prompt.

Prior study shows that pre-training techniques can boost the performance of visual document understanding (VDU), which typically requires models to gain abilities to perceive and reason both document texts and layouts (e.g., locations of texts and table-cells). To this end, we propose visually guided generative text-layout pre-training, named ViTLP. Given a document image, the model optimizes hierarchical language and layout modeling objectives to generate the interleaved text and layout sequence. In addition, to address the limitation of processing long documents by Transformers, we introduce a straightforward yet effective multi-segment generative pre-training scheme, facilitating ViTLP to process word-intensive documents of any length. ViTLP can function as a native OCR model to localize and recognize texts of document images. Besides, ViTLP can be effectively applied to various downstream VDU tasks. Extensive experiments show that ViTLP achieves competitive performance over existing baselines on benchmark VDU tasks, including information extraction, document classification, and document question answering.

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

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a key tool for monitoring construction sites, where aligning the evolving as-built state with the as-planned design enables early error detection and reduces costly rework. LiDAR-based SLAM achieves high geometric precision, but its sensors are typically large and power-demanding, limiting their use on portable platforms. Visual SLAM offers a practical alternative with lightweight cameras already embedded in most mobile devices. however, visually mapping construction environments remains challenging: repetitive layouts, occlusions, and incomplete or low-texture structures often cause drift in the trajectory map. To mitigate this, we propose an RGB-D SLAM system that incorporates the Building Information Model (BIM) as structural prior knowledge. Instead of relying solely on visual cues, our system continuously establishes correspondences between detected wall and their BIM counterparts, which are then introduced as constraints in the back-end optimization. The proposed method operates in real time and has been validated on real construction sites, reducing trajectory error by an average of 23.71% and map RMSE by 7.14% compared to visual SLAM baselines. These results demonstrate that BIM constraints enable reliable alignment of the digital plan with the as-built scene, even under partially constructed conditions.

Versatile and adaptive semantic understanding would enable autonomous systems to comprehend and interact with their surroundings. Existing fixed-class models limit the adaptability of indoor mobile and assistive autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce LEXIS, a real-time indoor Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system that harnesses the open-vocabulary nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a unified approach to scene understanding and place recognition. The approach first builds a topological SLAM graph of the environment (using visual-inertial odometry) and embeds Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) features in the graph nodes. We use this representation for flexible room classification and segmentation, serving as a basis for room-centric place recognition. This allows loop closure searches to be directed towards semantically relevant places. Our proposed system is evaluated using both public, simulated data and real-world data, covering office and home environments. It successfully categorizes rooms with varying layouts and dimensions and outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA). For place recognition and trajectory estimation tasks we achieve equivalent performance to the SOTA, all also utilizing the same pre-trained model. Lastly, we demonstrate the system's potential for planning.

We propose a novel approach to image generation by decomposing an image into a structured sequence, where each element in the sequence shares the same spatial resolution but differs in the number of unique tokens used, capturing different level of visual granularity. Image generation is carried out through our newly introduced Next Visual Granularity (NVG) generation framework, which generates a visual granularity sequence beginning from an empty image and progressively refines it, from global layout to fine details, in a structured manner. This iterative process encodes a hierarchical, layered representation that offers fine-grained control over the generation process across multiple granularity levels. We train a series of NVG models for class-conditional image generation on the ImageNet dataset and observe clear scaling behavior. Compared to the VAR series, NVG consistently outperforms it in terms of FID scores (3.30 -> 3.03, 2.57 ->2.44, 2.09 -> 2.06). We also conduct extensive analysis to showcase the capability and potential of the NVG framework. Our code and models will be released.

Multi-instance image generation (MIG) remains a significant challenge for modern diffusion models due to key limitations in achieving precise control over object layout and preserving the identity of multiple distinct subjects. To address these limitations, we introduce ContextGen, a novel Diffusion Transformer framework for multi-instance generation that is guided by both layout and reference images. Our approach integrates two key technical contributions: a Contextual Layout Anchoring (CLA) mechanism that incorporates the composite layout image into the generation context to robustly anchor the objects in their desired positions, and Identity Consistency Attention (ICA), an innovative attention mechanism that leverages contextual reference images to ensure the identity consistency of multiple instances. Recognizing the lack of large-scale, hierarchically-structured datasets for this task, we introduce IMIG-100K, the first dataset with detailed layout and identity annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ContextGen sets a new state-of-the-art, outperforming existing methods in control precision, identity fidelity, and overall visual quality.

Self-supervised pre-training techniques have achieved remarkable progress in Document AI. Most multimodal pre-trained models use a masked language modeling objective to learn bidirectional representations on the text modality, but they differ in pre-training objectives for the image modality. This discrepancy adds difficulty to multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we propose LayoutLMv3 to pre-train multimodal Transformers for Document AI with unified text and image masking. Additionally, LayoutLMv3 is pre-trained with a word-patch alignment objective to learn cross-modal alignment by predicting whether the corresponding image patch of a text word is masked. The simple unified architecture and training objectives make LayoutLMv3 a general-purpose pre-trained model for both text-centric and image-centric Document AI tasks. Experimental results show that LayoutLMv3 achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in text-centric tasks, including form understanding, receipt understanding, and document visual question answering, but also in image-centric tasks such as document image classification and document layout analysis. The code and models are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutlmv3.

The automated analysis of chemical literature holds promise to accelerate discovery in fields such as material science and drug development. In particular, search capabilities for chemical structures and Markush structures (chemical structure templates) within patent documents are valuable, e.g., for prior-art search. Advancements have been made in the automatic extraction of chemical structures from text and images, yet the Markush structures remain largely unexplored due to their complex multi-modal nature. In this work, we present MarkushGrapher, a multi-modal approach for recognizing Markush structures in documents. Our method jointly encodes text, image, and layout information through a Vision-Text-Layout encoder and an Optical Chemical Structure Recognition vision encoder. These representations are merged and used to auto-regressively generate a sequential graph representation of the Markush structure along with a table defining its variable groups. To overcome the lack of real-world training data, we propose a synthetic data generation pipeline that produces a wide range of realistic Markush structures. Additionally, we present M2S, the first annotated benchmark of real-world Markush structures, to advance research on this challenging task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art chemistry-specific and general-purpose vision-language models in most evaluation settings. Code, models, and datasets will be available.

In this paper, we propose RoomPlanner, the first fully automatic 3D room generation framework for painlessly creating realistic indoor scenes with only short text as input. Without any manual layout design or panoramic image guidance, our framework can generate explicit layout criteria for rational spatial placement. We begin by introducing a hierarchical structure of language-driven agent planners that can automatically parse short and ambiguous prompts into detailed scene descriptions. These descriptions include raw spatial and semantic attributes for each object and the background, which are then used to initialize 3D point clouds. To position objects within bounded environments, we implement two arrangement constraints that iteratively optimize spatial arrangements, ensuring a collision-free and accessible layout solution. In the final rendering stage, we propose a novel AnyReach Sampling strategy for camera trajectory, along with the Interval Timestep Flow Sampling (ITFS) strategy, to efficiently optimize the coarse 3D Gaussian scene representation. These approaches help reduce the total generation time to under 30 minutes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can produce geometrically rational 3D indoor scenes, surpassing prior approaches in both rendering speed and visual quality while preserving editability. The code will be available soon.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a core paradigm in document question answering tasks. However, existing methods have limitations when dealing with multimodal documents: one category of methods relies on layout analysis and text extraction, which can only utilize explicit text information and struggle to capture images or unstructured content; the other category treats document segmentation as visual input and directly passes it to visual language models (VLMs) for processing, yet it ignores the semantic advantages of text, leading to suboptimal retrieval and generation results. To address these research gaps, we propose the Co-Modality-based RAG (CMRAG) framework, which can simultaneously leverage texts and images for more accurate retrieval and generation. Our framework includes two key components: (1) a Unified Encoding Model (UEM) that projects queries, parsed text, and images into a shared embedding space via triplet-based training, and (2) a Unified Co-Modality-informed Retrieval (UCMR) method that statistically normalizes similarity scores to effectively fuse cross-modal signals. To support research in this direction, we further construct and release a large-scale triplet dataset of (query, text, image) examples. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework consistently outperforms single-modality--based RAG in multiple visual document question-answering (VDQA) benchmarks. The findings of this paper show that integrating co-modality information into the RAG framework in a unified manner is an effective approach to improving the performance of complex VDQA systems.

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

Personalized text-to-image (P-T2I) generation aims to create new, text-guided images featuring the personalized subject with a few reference images. However, balancing the trade-off relationship between prompt fidelity and identity preservation remains a critical challenge. To address the issue, we propose a novel P-T2I method called Layout-and-Retouch, consisting of two stages: 1) layout generation and 2) retouch. In the first stage, our step-blended inference utilizes the inherent sample diversity of vanilla T2I models to produce diversified layout images, while also enhancing prompt fidelity. In the second stage, multi-source attention swapping integrates the context image from the first stage with the reference image, leveraging the structure from the context image and extracting visual features from the reference image. This achieves high prompt fidelity while preserving identity characteristics. Through our extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method generates a wide variety of images with diverse layouts while maintaining the unique identity features of the personalized objects, even with challenging text prompts. This versatility highlights the potential of our framework to handle complex conditions, significantly enhancing the diversity and applicability of personalized image synthesis.

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

Despite the existing evolution of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), a non-neglectable limitation remains in their struggle with visual text grounding, especially in text-rich images of documents. Document images, such as scanned forms and infographics, highlight critical challenges due to their complex layouts and textual content. However, current benchmarks do not fully address these challenges, as they mostly focus on visual grounding on natural images, rather than text-rich document images. Thus, to bridge this gap, we introduce TRIG, a novel task with a newly designed instruction dataset for benchmarking and improving the Text-Rich Image Grounding capabilities of MLLMs in document question-answering. Specifically, we propose an OCR-LLM-human interaction pipeline to create 800 manually annotated question-answer pairs as a benchmark and a large-scale training set of 90$ synthetic data based on four diverse datasets. A comprehensive evaluation of various MLLMs on our proposed benchmark exposes substantial limitations in their grounding capability on text-rich images. In addition, we propose two simple and effective TRIG methods based on general instruction tuning and plug-and-play efficient embedding, respectively. By finetuning MLLMs on our synthetic dataset, they promisingly improve spatial reasoning and grounding capabilities.

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

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at reasoning in linguistic space but struggle with perceptual understanding that requires dense visual perception, e.g., spatial reasoning and geometric awareness. This limitation stems from the fact that current VLMs have limited mechanisms to capture dense visual information across spatial dimensions. We introduce Chain-of-Visual-Thought (COVT), a framework that enables VLMs to reason not only in words but also through continuous visual tokens-compact latent representations that encode rich perceptual cues. Within a small budget of roughly 20 tokens, COVT distills knowledge from lightweight vision experts, capturing complementary properties such as 2D appearance, 3D geometry, spatial layout, and edge structure. During training, the VLM with COVT autoregressively predicts these visual tokens to reconstruct dense supervision signals (e.g., depth, segmentation, edges, and DINO features). At inference, the model reasons directly in the continuous visual token space, preserving efficiency while optionally decoding dense predictions for interpretability. Evaluated across more than ten diverse perception benchmarks, including CV-Bench, MMVP, RealWorldQA, MMStar, WorldMedQA, and HRBench, integrating COVT into strong VLMs such as Qwen2.5-VL and LLaVA consistently improves performance by 3% to 16% and demonstrates that compact continuous visual thinking enables more precise, grounded, and interpretable multimodal intelligence.

Image-to-video (I2V) generation aims to use the initial frame (alongside a text prompt) to create a video sequence. A grand challenge in I2V generation is to maintain visual consistency throughout the video: existing methods often struggle to preserve the integrity of the subject, background, and style from the first frame, as well as ensure a fluid and logical progression within the video narrative. To mitigate these issues, we propose ConsistI2V, a diffusion-based method to enhance visual consistency for I2V generation. Specifically, we introduce (1) spatiotemporal attention over the first frame to maintain spatial and motion consistency, (2) noise initialization from the low-frequency band of the first frame to enhance layout consistency. These two approaches enable ConsistI2V to generate highly consistent videos. We also extend the proposed approaches to show their potential to improve consistency in auto-regressive long video generation and camera motion control. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we propose I2V-Bench, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for I2V generation. Our automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of ConsistI2V over existing methods.

Document pre-trained models and grid-based models have proven to be very effective on various tasks in Document AI. However, for the document layout analysis (DLA) task, existing document pre-trained models, even those pre-trained in a multi-modal fashion, usually rely on either textual features or visual features. Grid-based models for DLA are multi-modality but largely neglect the effect of pre-training. To fully leverage multi-modal information and exploit pre-training techniques to learn better representation for DLA, in this paper, we present VGT, a two-stream Vision Grid Transformer, in which Grid Transformer (GiT) is proposed and pre-trained for 2D token-level and segment-level semantic understanding. Furthermore, a new dataset named D^4LA, which is so far the most diverse and detailed manually-annotated benchmark for document layout analysis, is curated and released. Experiment results have illustrated that the proposed VGT model achieves new state-of-the-art results on DLA tasks, e.g. PubLayNet (95.7%rightarrow96.2%), DocBank (79.6%rightarrow84.1%), and D^4LA (67.7%rightarrow68.8%). The code and models as well as the D^4LA dataset will be made publicly available ~https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery.

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

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

The efficacy of Multimodal Transformers in visually-rich document understanding (VrDU) is critically constrained by two inherent limitations: the lack of explicit modeling for logical reading order and the interference of visual tokens that dilutes attention on textual semantics. To address these challenges, this paper presents ROAP, a lightweight and architecture-agnostic pipeline designed to optimize attention distributions in Layout Transformers without altering their pre-trained backbones. The proposed pipeline first employs an Adaptive-XY-Gap (AXG-Tree) to robustly extract hierarchical reading sequences from complex layouts. These sequences are then integrated into the attention mechanism via a Reading-Order-Aware Relative Position Bias (RO-RPB). Furthermore, a Textual-Token Sub-block Attention Prior (TT-Prior) is introduced to adaptively suppress visual noise and enhance fine-grained text-text interactions. Extensive experiments on the FUNSD and CORD benchmarks demonstrate that ROAP consistently improves the performance of representative backbones, including LayoutLMv3 and GeoLayoutLM. These findings confirm that explicitly modeling reading logic and regulating modality interference are critical for robust document understanding, offering a scalable solution for complex layout analysis. The implementation code will be released at https://github.com/KevinYuLei/ROAP.

The field of controllable image generation has seen significant advancements, with various architectures improving generation layout consistency with control signals. However, contemporary methods still face challenges in bridging the semantic gap between input text prompts with sparse semantics and the target images, often over-relying on low-level control signals to infer regional details. To address this challenge, we propose ControlThinker, a novel framework that employs a "comprehend-then-generate" paradigm. Firstly, by incentivizing the visual reasoning capability of a MLLM, latent semantics from control images are mined to enrich text prompts. This enriched semantic understanding then seamlessly aids in image generation without the need for additional complex modifications. To further tackle the uncertainty arising from the ambiguity of control images, we encourage broader exploration of reasoning trajectories and select the optimal one using a metric-based output reward model (ORM). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ControlThinker effectively mitigates the semantic gap between raw text prompts and target images, resulting in improved visual quality and semantic consistency across a wide range of benchmarks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/Maplebb/ControlThinker.

In this paper, we present StrucTexTv2, an effective document image pre-training framework, by performing masked visual-textual prediction. It consists of two self-supervised pre-training tasks: masked image modeling and masked language modeling, based on text region-level image masking. The proposed method randomly masks some image regions according to the bounding box coordinates of text words. The objectives of our pre-training tasks are reconstructing the pixels of masked image regions and the corresponding masked tokens simultaneously. Hence the pre-trained encoder can capture more textual semantics in comparison to the masked image modeling that usually predicts the masked image patches. Compared to the masked multi-modal modeling methods for document image understanding that rely on both the image and text modalities, StrucTexTv2 models image-only input and potentially deals with more application scenarios free from OCR pre-processing. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks of document image understanding demonstrate the effectiveness of StrucTexTv2. It achieves competitive or even new state-of-the-art performance in various downstream tasks such as image classification, layout analysis, table structure recognition, document OCR, and information extraction under the end-to-end scenario.

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

One of the principal challenges in building VLM-powered GUI agents is visual grounding, i.e., localizing the appropriate screen region for action execution based on both the visual content and the textual plans. Most existing work formulates this as a text-based coordinate generation task. However, these approaches suffer from several limitations: weak spatial-semantic alignment, inability to handle ambiguous supervision targets, and a mismatch between the dense nature of screen coordinates and the coarse, patch-level granularity of visual features extracted by models like Vision Transformers. In this paper, we propose GUI-Actor, a VLM-based method for coordinate-free GUI grounding. At its core, GUI-Actor introduces an attention-based action head that learns to align a dedicated <ACTOR> token with all relevant visual patch tokens, enabling the model to propose one or more action regions in a single forward pass. In line with this, we further design a grounding verifier to evaluate and select the most plausible action region from the candidates proposed for action execution. Extensive experiments show that GUI-Actor outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on multiple GUI action grounding benchmarks, with improved generalization to unseen screen resolutions and layouts. Notably, GUI-Actor-7B even surpasses UI-TARS-72B (38.1) on ScreenSpot-Pro, achieving scores of 40.7 with Qwen2-VL and 44.6 with Qwen2.5-VL as backbones. Furthermore, by incorporating the verifier, we find that fine-tuning only the newly introduced action head (~100M parameters for 7B model) while keeping the VLM backbone frozen is sufficient to achieve performance comparable to previous state-of-the-art models, highlighting that GUI-Actor can endow the underlying VLM with effective grounding capabilities without compromising its general-purpose strengths.

Visual generation models have made remarkable progress in creating realistic images from text prompts, yet struggle with complex prompts that specify multiple objects with precise spatial relationships and attributes. Effective handling of such prompts requires explicit reasoning about the semantic content and spatial layout. We present GoT-R1, a framework that applies reinforcement learning to enhance semantic-spatial reasoning in visual generation. Building upon the Generation Chain-of-Thought approach, GoT-R1 enables models to autonomously discover effective reasoning strategies beyond predefined templates through carefully designed reinforcement learning. To achieve this, we propose a dual-stage multi-dimensional reward framework that leverages MLLMs to evaluate both the reasoning process and final output, enabling effective supervision across the entire generation pipeline. The reward system assesses semantic alignment, spatial accuracy, and visual quality in a unified approach. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements on T2I-CompBench benchmark, particularly in compositional tasks involving precise spatial relationships and attribute binding. GoT-R1 advances the state-of-the-art in image generation by successfully transferring sophisticated reasoning capabilities to the visual generation domain. To facilitate future research, we make our code and pretrained models publicly available at https://github.com/gogoduan/GoT-R1.

People see text. Humans read by recognizing words as visual objects, including their shapes, layouts, and patterns, before connecting them to meaning, which enables us to handle typos, distorted fonts, and various scripts effectively. Modern large language models (LLMs), however, rely on subword tokenization, fragmenting text into pieces from a fixed vocabulary. While effective for high-resource languages, this approach over-segments low-resource languages, yielding long, linguistically meaningless sequences and inflating computation. In this work, we challenge this entrenched paradigm and move toward a vision-centric alternative. Our method, SeeTok, renders text as images (visual-text) and leverages pretrained multimodal LLMs to interpret them, reusing strong OCR and text-vision alignment abilities learned from large-scale multimodal training. Across three different language tasks, SeeTok matches or surpasses subword tokenizers while requiring 4.43 times fewer tokens and reducing FLOPs by 70.5%, with additional gains in cross-lingual generalization, robustness to typographic noise, and linguistic hierarchy. SeeTok signals a shift from symbolic tokenization to human-like visual reading, and takes a step toward more natural and cognitively inspired language models.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal understanding, yet they struggle when reasoning over information-intensive images that densely interleave textual annotations with fine-grained graphical elements. The main challenges lie in precisely localizing critical cues in dense layouts and multi-hop reasoning to integrate dispersed evidence. We propose Speculative Verdict (SV), a training-free framework inspired by speculative decoding that combines multiple lightweight draft experts with a large verdict model. In the draft stage, small VLMs act as draft experts to generate reasoning paths that provide diverse localization candidates; in the verdict stage, a strong VLM synthesizes these paths to produce the final answer, minimizing computational cost while recovering correct answers. To further improve efficiency and accuracy, SV introduces a consensus expert selection mechanism that forwards only high-agreement reasoning paths to the verdict. Empirically, SV achieves consistent gains on challenging information-intensive and high-resolution visual question answering benchmarks, including InfographicVQA, ChartMuseum, ChartQAPro, and HR-Bench 4K. By synthesizing correct insights from multiple partially accurate reasoning paths, SV achieves both error correction and cost-efficiency compared to large proprietary models or training pipelines. Code is available at https://github.com/Tinaliu0123/speculative-verdict

Visual presentations are vital for effective communication. Early attempts to automate their creation using deep learning often faced issues such as poorly organized layouts, inaccurate text summarization, and a lack of image understanding, leading to mismatched visuals and text. These limitations restrict their application in formal contexts like business and scientific research. To address these challenges, we propose PreGenie, an agentic and modular framework powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for generating high-quality visual presentations. PreGenie is built on the Slidev presentation framework, where slides are rendered from Markdown code. It operates in two stages: (1) Analysis and Initial Generation, which summarizes multimodal input and generates initial code, and (2) Review and Re-generation, which iteratively reviews intermediate code and rendered slides to produce final, high-quality presentations. Each stage leverages multiple MLLMs that collaborate and share information. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that PreGenie excels in multimodal understanding, outperforming existing models in both aesthetics and content consistency, while aligning more closely with human design preferences.

Aerial robots play a vital role in various applications where the situational awareness of the robots concerning the environment is a fundamental demand. As one such use case, drones in GPS-denied environments require equipping with different sensors (e.g., vision sensors) that provide reliable sensing results while performing pose estimation and localization. In this paper, reconstructing the maps of indoor environments alongside generating 3D scene graphs for a high-level representation using a camera mounted on a drone is targeted. Accordingly, an aerial robot equipped with a companion computer and an RGB-D camera was built and employed to be appropriately integrated with a Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM) framework proposed by the authors. To enhance the situational awareness of the robot while reconstructing maps, various structural elements, including doors and walls, were labeled with printed fiducial markers, and a dictionary of the topological relations among them was fed to the system. The VSLAM system detects markers and reconstructs the map of the indoor areas enriched with higher-level semantic entities, including corridors and rooms. Another achievement is generating multi-layered vision-based situational graphs containing enhanced hierarchical representations of the indoor environment. In this regard, integrating VSLAM into the employed drone is the primary target of this paper to provide an end-to-end robot application for GPS-denied environments. To show the practicality of the system, various real-world condition experiments have been conducted in indoor scenarios with dissimilar structural layouts. Evaluations show the proposed drone application can perform adequately w.r.t. the ground-truth data and its baseline.

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.

Visual storytelling often uses nontypical aspect-ratio images like scroll paintings, comic strips, and panoramas to create an expressive and compelling narrative. While generative AI has achieved great success and shown the potential to reshape the creative industry, it remains a challenge to generate coherent and engaging content with arbitrary size and controllable style, concept, and layout, all of which are essential for visual storytelling. To overcome the shortcomings of previous methods including repetitive content, style inconsistency, and lack of controllability, we propose MagicScroll, a multi-layered, progressive diffusion-based image generation framework with a novel semantic-aware denoising process. The model enables fine-grained control over the generated image on object, scene, and background levels with text, image, and layout conditions. We also establish the first benchmark for nontypical aspect-ratio image generation for visual storytelling including mediums like paintings, comics, and cinematic panoramas, with customized metrics for systematic evaluation. Through comparative and ablation studies, MagicScroll showcases promising results in aligning with the narrative text, improving visual coherence, and engaging the audience. We plan to release the code and benchmark in the hope of a better collaboration between AI researchers and creative practitioners involving visual storytelling.

We present SPHINX, a versatile multi-modal large language model (MLLM) with a joint mixing of model weights, tuning tasks, and visual embeddings. First, for stronger vision-language alignment, we unfreeze the large language model (LLM) during pre-training, and introduce a weight mix strategy between LLMs trained by real-world and synthetic data. By directly integrating the weights from two domains, the mixed LLM can efficiently incorporate diverse semantics with favorable robustness. Then, to enable multi-purpose capabilities, we mix a variety of tasks for joint visual instruction tuning, and design task-specific instructions to avoid inter-task conflict. In addition to the basic visual question answering, we include more challenging tasks such as region-level understanding, caption grounding, document layout detection, and human pose estimation, contributing to mutual enhancement over different scenarios. Additionally, we propose to extract comprehensive visual embeddings from various network architectures, pre-training paradigms, and information granularity, providing language models with more robust image representations. Based on our proposed joint mixing, SPHINX exhibits superior multi-modal understanding capabilities on a wide range of applications. On top of this, we further propose an efficient strategy aiming to better capture fine-grained appearances of high-resolution images. With a mixing of different scales and high-resolution sub-images, SPHINX attains exceptional visual parsing and reasoning performance on existing evaluation benchmarks. We hope our work may cast a light on the exploration of joint mixing in future MLLM research. Code is released at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory.

Human visual imagination usually begins with analogies or rough sketches. For example, given an image with a girl playing guitar before a building, one may analogously imagine how it seems like if Iron Man playing guitar before Pyramid in Egypt. Nonetheless, visual condition may not be precisely aligned with the imaginary result indicated by text prompt, and existing layout-controllable text-to-image (T2I) generation models is prone to producing degraded generated results with obvious artifacts. To address this issue, we present a novel T2I generation method dubbed SmartControl, which is designed to modify the rough visual conditions for adapting to text prompt. The key idea of our SmartControl is to relax the visual condition on the areas that are conflicted with text prompts. In specific, a Control Scale Predictor (CSP) is designed to identify the conflict regions and predict the local control scales, while a dataset with text prompts and rough visual conditions is constructed for training CSP. It is worth noting that, even with a limited number (e.g., 1,000~2,000) of training samples, our SmartControl can generalize well to unseen objects. Extensive experiments on four typical visual condition types clearly show the efficacy of our SmartControl against state-of-the-arts. Source code, pre-trained models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/SmartControl.

Existing multimodal conversation agents have shown impressive abilities to locate absolute positions or retrieve attributes in simple scenarios, but they fail to perform well when complex relative positions and information alignments are involved, which poses a bottleneck in response quality. In this paper, we propose a Situated Conversation Agent Petrained with Multimodal Questions from INcremental Layout Graph (SPRING) with abilities of reasoning multi-hops spatial relations and connecting them with visual attributes in crowded situated scenarios. Specifically, we design two types of Multimodal Question Answering (MQA) tasks to pretrain the agent. All QA pairs utilized during pretraining are generated from novel Incremental Layout Graphs (ILG). QA pair difficulty labels automatically annotated by ILG are used to promote MQA-based Curriculum Learning. Experimental results verify the SPRING's effectiveness, showing that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both SIMMC 1.0 and SIMMC 2.0 datasets.

Key information extraction (KIE) from document images requires understanding the contextual and spatial semantics of texts in two-dimensional (2D) space. Many recent studies try to solve the task by developing pre-trained language models focusing on combining visual features from document images with texts and their layout. On the other hand, this paper tackles the problem by going back to the basic: effective combination of text and layout. Specifically, we propose a pre-trained language model, named BROS (BERT Relying On Spatiality), that encodes relative positions of texts in 2D space and learns from unlabeled documents with area-masking strategy. With this optimized training scheme for understanding texts in 2D space, BROS shows comparable or better performance compared to previous methods on four KIE benchmarks (FUNSD, SROIE*, CORD, and SciTSR) without relying on visual features. This paper also reveals two real-world challenges in KIE tasks-(1) minimizing the error from incorrect text ordering and (2) efficient learning from fewer downstream examples-and demonstrates the superiority of BROS over previous methods. Code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/bros.

We seek to predict the 6 degree-of-freedom (6DoF) pose of a query photograph with respect to a large indoor 3D map. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we develop a new large-scale visual localization method targeted for indoor environments. The method proceeds along three steps: (i) efficient retrieval of candidate poses that ensures scalability to large-scale environments, (ii) pose estimation using dense matching rather than local features to deal with textureless indoor scenes, and (iii) pose verification by virtual view synthesis to cope with significant changes in viewpoint, scene layout, and occluders. Second, we collect a new dataset with reference 6DoF poses for large-scale indoor localization. Query photographs are captured by mobile phones at a different time than the reference 3D map, thus presenting a realistic indoor localization scenario. Third, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art indoor localization approaches on this new challenging data.

Although most current large multimodal models (LMMs) can already understand photos of natural scenes and portraits, their understanding of abstract images, e.g., charts, maps, or layouts, and visual reasoning capabilities remains quite rudimentary. They often struggle with simple daily tasks, such as reading time from a clock, understanding a flowchart, or planning a route using a road map. In light of this, we design a multi-modal self-instruct, utilizing large language models and their code capabilities to synthesize massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions across daily scenarios. Our strategy effortlessly creates a multimodal benchmark with 11,193 instructions for eight visual scenarios: charts, tables, simulated maps, dashboards, flowcharts, relation graphs, floor plans, and visual puzzles. This benchmark, constructed with simple lines and geometric elements, exposes the shortcomings of most advanced LMMs like Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o in abstract image understanding, spatial relations reasoning, and visual element induction. Besides, to verify the quality of our synthetic data, we fine-tune an LMM using 62,476 synthetic chart, table and road map instructions. The results demonstrate improved chart understanding and map navigation performance, and also demonstrate potential benefits for other visual reasoning tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zwq2018/Multi-modal-Self-instruct.

Text-rich visual understanding-the ability to process environments where dense textual content is integrated with visuals-is crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interact effectively with structured environments. To enhance this capability, we propose synthesizing general multimodal instructions from webpage UIs using text-based large language models (LLMs). Despite lacking direct visual input, text-based LLMs are able to process structured text representations from webpage accessibility trees. These instructions are then paired with UI screenshots to train multimodal models. We introduce MultiUI, a dataset containing 7.3 million samples from 1 million websites, covering diverse multimodal tasks and UI layouts. Models trained on MultiUI not only excel in web UI tasks-achieving up to a 48\% improvement on VisualWebBench and a 19.1\% boost in action accuracy on a web agent dataset Mind2Web-but also generalize surprisingly well to non-web UI tasks and even to non-UI domains, such as document understanding, OCR, and chart interpretation. These results highlight the broad applicability of web UI data for advancing text-rich visual understanding across various scenarios.

Document Question Answering (QA) presents a challenge in understanding visually-rich documents (VRD), particularly those dominated by lengthy textual content like research journal articles. Existing studies primarily focus on real-world documents with sparse text, while challenges persist in comprehending the hierarchical semantic relations among multiple pages to locate multimodal components. To address this gap, we propose PDF-MVQA, which is tailored for research journal articles, encompassing multiple pages and multimodal information retrieval. Unlike traditional machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks, our approach aims to retrieve entire paragraphs containing answers or visually rich document entities like tables and figures. Our contributions include the introduction of a comprehensive PDF Document VQA dataset, allowing the examination of semantically hierarchical layout structures in text-dominant documents. We also present new VRD-QA frameworks designed to grasp textual contents and relations among document layouts simultaneously, extending page-level understanding to the entire multi-page document. Through this work, we aim to enhance the capabilities of existing vision-and-language models in handling challenges posed by text-dominant documents in VRD-QA.