Daily Papers

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to navigate in realistic 3D environments using natural language instructions. Existing VLN methods suffer from training on small-scale environments or unreasonable path-instruction datasets, limiting the generalization to unseen environments. There are massive house tour videos on YouTube, providing abundant real navigation experiences and layout information. However, these videos have not been explored for VLN before. In this paper, we propose to learn an agent from these videos by creating a large-scale dataset which comprises reasonable path-instruction pairs from house tour videos and pre-training the agent on it. To achieve this, we have to tackle the challenges of automatically constructing path-instruction pairs and exploiting real layout knowledge from raw and unlabeled videos. To address these, we first leverage an entropy-based method to construct the nodes of a path trajectory. Then, we propose an action-aware generator for generating instructions from unlabeled trajectories. Last, we devise a trajectory judgment pretext task to encourage the agent to mine the layout knowledge. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks (R2R and REVERIE). Code is available at https://github.com/JeremyLinky/YouTube-VLN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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

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

Content-aware 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

In the text-to-image generation field, recent remarkable progress in Stable Diffusion makes it possible to generate rich kinds of novel photorealistic images. However, current models still face misalignment issues (e.g., problematic spatial relation understanding and numeration failure) in complex natural scenes, which impedes the high-faithfulness text-to-image generation. Although recent efforts have been made to improve controllability by giving fine-grained guidance (e.g., sketch and scribbles), this issue has not been fundamentally tackled since users have to provide such guidance information manually. In this work, we strive to synthesize high-fidelity images that are semantically aligned with a given textual prompt without any guidance. Toward this end, we propose a coarse-to-fine paradigm to achieve layout planning and image generation. Concretely, we first generate the coarse-grained layout conditioned on a given textual prompt via in-context learning based on Large Language Models. Afterward, we propose a fine-grained object-interaction diffusion method to synthesize high-faithfulness images conditioned on the prompt and the automatically generated layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models in terms of layout and image generation. Our code and settings are available at https://layoutllm-t2i.github.io.

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

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

Synthesizing interactive 3D scenes from text is essential for gaming, virtual reality, and embodied AI. However, existing methods face several challenges. Learning-based approaches depend on small-scale indoor datasets, limiting the scene diversity and layout complexity. While large language models (LLMs) can leverage diverse text-domain knowledge, they struggle with spatial realism, often producing unnatural object placements that fail to respect common sense. Our key insight is that vision perception can bridge this gap by providing realistic spatial guidance that LLMs lack. To this end, we introduce Scenethesis, a training-free agentic framework that integrates LLM-based scene planning with vision-guided layout refinement. Given a text prompt, Scenethesis first employs an LLM to draft a coarse layout. A vision module then refines it by generating an image guidance and extracting scene structure to capture inter-object relations. Next, an optimization module iteratively enforces accurate pose alignment and physical plausibility, preventing artifacts like object penetration and instability. Finally, a judge module verifies spatial coherence. Comprehensive experiments show that Scenethesis generates diverse, realistic, and physically plausible 3D interactive scenes, making it valuable for virtual content creation, simulation environments, and embodied AI research.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 .

In this paper, we address the problem of conditional scene decoration for 360-degree images. Our method takes a 360-degree background photograph of an indoor scene and generates decorated images of the same scene in the panorama view. To do this, we develop a 360-aware object layout generator that learns latent object vectors in the 360-degree view to enable a variety of furniture arrangements for an input 360-degree background image. We use this object layout to condition a generative adversarial network to synthesize images of an input scene. To further reinforce the generation capability of our model, we develop a simple yet effective scene emptier that removes the generated furniture and produces an emptied scene for our model to learn a cyclic constraint. We train the model on the Structure3D dataset and show that our model can generate diverse decorations with controllable object layout. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Structure3D dataset and generalizes well to the Zillow indoor scene dataset. Our user study confirms the immersive experiences provided by the realistic image quality and furniture layout in our generation results. Our implementation will be made available.

This work explores knowledge distillation (KD) for visually-rich document (VRD) applications such as document layout analysis (DLA) and document image classification (DIC). While VRD research is dependent on increasingly sophisticated and cumbersome models, the field has neglected to study efficiency via model compression. Here, we design a KD experimentation methodology for more lean, performant models on document understanding (DU) tasks that are integral within larger task pipelines. We carefully selected KD strategies (response-based, feature-based) for distilling knowledge to and from backbones with different architectures (ResNet, ViT, DiT) and capacities (base, small, tiny). We study what affects the teacher-student knowledge gap and find that some methods (tuned vanilla KD, MSE, SimKD with an apt projector) can consistently outperform supervised student training. Furthermore, we design downstream task setups to evaluate covariate shift and the robustness of distilled DLA models on zero-shot layout-aware document visual question answering (DocVQA). DLA-KD experiments result in a large mAP knowledge gap, which unpredictably translates to downstream robustness, accentuating the need to further explore how to efficiently obtain more semantic document layout awareness.

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

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

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

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

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.

Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generative models have shown remarkable capabilities in producing diverse and imaginative visuals based on text prompts. Despite the advancement, these diffusion models sometimes struggle to translate the semantic content from the text into images entirely. While conditioning on the layout has shown to be effective in improving the compositional ability of T2I diffusion models, they typically require manual layout input. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to improving T2I diffusion models using Large Language Models (LLMs) as layout generators. Our method leverages the Chain-of-Thought prompting of LLMs to interpret text and generate spatially reasonable object layouts. The generated layout is then used to enhance the generated images' composition and spatial accuracy. Moreover, we propose an efficient adapter based on a cross-attention mechanism, which explicitly integrates the layout information into the stable diffusion models. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in image quality and layout accuracy, showcasing the potential of LLMs in augmenting generative image models.

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

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

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

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has streamlined frontend interface creation through tools like Vercel's V0, yet surfaced challenges in design quality (e.g., accessibility, and usability). Current solutions, often limited by their focus, generalisability, or data dependency, fall short in addressing these complexities. Moreover, none of them examine the quality of LLM-generated UI design. In this work, we introduce DesignRepair, a novel dual-stream design guideline-aware system to examine and repair the UI design quality issues from both code aspect and rendered page aspect. We utilised the mature and popular Material Design as our knowledge base to guide this process. Specifically, we first constructed a comprehensive knowledge base encoding Google's Material Design principles into low-level component knowledge base and high-level system design knowledge base. After that, DesignRepair employs a LLM for the extraction of key components and utilizes the Playwright tool for precise page analysis, aligning these with the established knowledge bases. Finally, we integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation with state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 to holistically refine and repair frontend code through a strategic divide and conquer approach. Our extensive evaluations validated the efficacy and utility of our approach, demonstrating significant enhancements in adherence to design guidelines, accessibility, and user experience metrics.

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

Recently, there has been growing interest in developing learning-based methods to detect and utilize salient semi-global or global structures, such as junctions, lines, planes, cuboids, smooth surfaces, and all types of symmetries, for 3D scene modeling and understanding. However, the ground truth annotations are often obtained via human labor, which is particularly challenging and inefficient for such tasks due to the large number of 3D structure instances (e.g., line segments) and other factors such as viewpoints and occlusions. In this paper, we present a new synthetic dataset, Structured3D, with the aim of providing large-scale photo-realistic images with rich 3D structure annotations for a wide spectrum of structured 3D modeling tasks. We take advantage of the availability of professional interior designs and automatically extract 3D structures from them. We generate high-quality images with an industry-leading rendering engine. We use our synthetic dataset in combination with real images to train deep networks for room layout estimation and demonstrate improved performance on benchmark datasets.

Inspired by cognitive theories, we introduce AnyHome, a framework that translates any text into well-structured and textured indoor scenes at a house-scale. By prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) with designed templates, our approach converts provided textual narratives into amodal structured representations. These representations guarantee consistent and realistic spatial layouts by directing the synthesis of a geometry mesh within defined constraints. A Score Distillation Sampling process is then employed to refine the geometry, followed by an egocentric inpainting process that adds lifelike textures to it. AnyHome stands out with its editability, customizability, diversity, and realism. The structured representations for scenes allow for extensive editing at varying levels of granularity. Capable of interpreting texts ranging from simple labels to detailed narratives, AnyHome generates detailed geometries and textures that outperform existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative measures.

Multimodal pre-training with text, layout, and image has made significant progress for Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU), especially the fixed-layout documents such as scanned document images. While, there are still a large number of digital documents where the layout information is not fixed and needs to be interactively and dynamically rendered for visualization, making existing layout-based pre-training approaches not easy to apply. In this paper, we propose MarkupLM for document understanding tasks with markup languages as the backbone, such as HTML/XML-based documents, where text and markup information is jointly pre-trained. Experiment results show that the pre-trained MarkupLM significantly outperforms the existing strong baseline models on several document understanding tasks. The pre-trained model and code will be publicly available at https://aka.ms/markuplm.

Recent text-to-image diffusion models have reached an unprecedented level in generating high-quality images. However, their exclusive reliance on textual prompts often falls short in accurately conveying fine-grained spatial compositions. In this paper, we propose LoCo, a training-free approach for layout-to-image synthesis that excels in producing high-quality images aligned with both textual prompts and spatial layouts. Our method introduces a Localized Attention Constraint to refine cross-attention for individual objects, ensuring their precise placement in designated regions. We further propose a Padding Token Constraint to leverage the semantic information embedded in previously neglected padding tokens, thereby preventing the undesired fusion of synthesized objects. LoCo seamlessly integrates into existing text-to-image and layout-to-image models, significantly amplifying their performance and effectively addressing semantic failures observed in prior methods. Through extensive experiments, we showcase the superiority of our approach, surpassing existing state-of-the-art training-free layout-to-image methods both qualitatively and quantitatively across multiple benchmarks.

Evaluating and Rethinking the current landscape of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), we observe that widely-used visual-language projection approaches (e.g., Q-former or MLP) focus on the alignment of image-text descriptions yet ignore the visual knowledge-dimension alignment, i.e., connecting visuals to their relevant knowledge. Visual knowledge plays a significant role in analyzing, inferring, and interpreting information from visuals, helping improve the accuracy of answers to knowledge-based visual questions. In this paper, we mainly explore improving LMMs with visual-language knowledge alignment, especially aimed at challenging knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA). To this end, we present a Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper (CVLM), which contains a pretrained Visual Knowledge Aligner (VKA) and a Fine-grained Knowledge Adapter (FKA) used in the multimodal instruction tuning stage. Specifically, we design the VKA based on the interaction between a small language model and a visual encoder, training it on collected image-knowledge pairs to achieve visual knowledge acquisition and projection. FKA is employed to distill the fine-grained visual knowledge of an image and inject it into Large Language Models (LLMs). We conduct extensive experiments on knowledge-based VQA benchmarks and experimental results show that CVLM significantly improves the performance of LMMs on knowledge-based VQA (average gain by 5.0%). Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of VKA and FKA, respectively.

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.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation with diffusion models have yielded remarkable results synthesizing highly realistic and diverse images. However, these models still encounter difficulties when generating images from prompts that demand spatial or common sense reasoning. We propose to equip diffusion models with enhanced reasoning capabilities by using off-the-shelf pretrained large language models (LLMs) in a novel two-stage generation process. First, we adapt an LLM to be a text-guided layout generator through in-context learning. When provided with an image prompt, an LLM outputs a scene layout in the form of bounding boxes along with corresponding individual descriptions. Second, we steer a diffusion model with a novel controller to generate images conditioned on the layout. Both stages utilize frozen pretrained models without any LLM or diffusion model parameter optimization. We validate the superiority of our design by demonstrating its ability to outperform the base diffusion model in accurately generating images according to prompts that necessitate both language and spatial reasoning. Additionally, our method naturally allows dialog-based scene specification and is able to handle prompts in a language that is not well-supported by the underlying diffusion model.

Multi-layer image generation is a fundamental task that enables users to isolate, select, and edit specific image layers, thereby revolutionizing interactions with generative models. In this paper, we introduce the Anonymous Region Transformer (ART), which facilitates the direct generation of variable multi-layer transparent images based on a global text prompt and an anonymous region layout. Inspired by Schema theory suggests that knowledge is organized in frameworks (schemas) that enable people to interpret and learn from new information by linking it to prior knowledge.}, this anonymous region layout allows the generative model to autonomously determine which set of visual tokens should align with which text tokens, which is in contrast to the previously dominant semantic layout for the image generation task. In addition, the layer-wise region crop mechanism, which only selects the visual tokens belonging to each anonymous region, significantly reduces attention computation costs and enables the efficient generation of images with numerous distinct layers (e.g., 50+). When compared to the full attention approach, our method is over 12 times faster and exhibits fewer layer conflicts. Furthermore, we propose a high-quality multi-layer transparent image autoencoder that supports the direct encoding and decoding of the transparency of variable multi-layer images in a joint manner. By enabling precise control and scalable layer generation, ART establishes a new paradigm for interactive content creation.

Reasoning about motion and space is a fundamental cognitive capability that is required by multiple real-world applications. While many studies highlight that large multimodal language models (MLMs) struggle to reason about space, they only focus on static spatial relationships, and not dynamic awareness of motion and space, i.e., reasoning about the effect of egocentric and object motions on spatial relationships. Manually annotating such object and camera movements is expensive. Hence, we introduce SAT, a simulated spatial aptitude training dataset comprising both static and dynamic spatial reasoning across 175K question-answer (QA) pairs and 20K scenes. Complementing this, we also construct a small (150 image-QAs) yet challenging dynamic spatial test set using real-world images. Leveraging our SAT datasets and 6 existing static spatial benchmarks, we systematically investigate what improves both static and dynamic spatial awareness. Our results reveal that simulations are surprisingly effective at imparting spatial aptitude to MLMs that translate to real images. We show that perfect annotations in simulation are more effective than existing approaches of pseudo-annotating real images. For instance, SAT training improves a LLaVA-13B model by an average 11% and a LLaVA-Video-7B model by an average 8% on multiple spatial benchmarks, including our real-image dynamic test set and spatial reasoning on long videos -- even outperforming some large proprietary models. While reasoning over static relationships improves with synthetic training data, there is still considerable room for improvement for dynamic reasoning questions.

Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs? To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 14 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving a code snippet given a textual description of its functionality. Recent work has been focused on using similarity metrics between neural embeddings of text and code. However, current language models are known to struggle with longer, compositional text, and multi-step reasoning. To overcome this limitation, we propose supplementing the query sentence with a layout of its semantic structure. The semantic layout is used to break down the final reasoning decision into a series of lower-level decisions. We use a Neural Module Network architecture to implement this idea. We compare our model - NS3 (Neuro-Symbolic Semantic Search) - to a number of baselines, including state-of-the-art semantic code retrieval methods, and evaluate on two datasets - CodeSearchNet and Code Search and Question Answering. We demonstrate that our approach results in more precise code retrieval, and we study the effectiveness of our modular design when handling compositional queries.

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

While Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models excel at generating visually appealing images of individual instances, they struggle to accurately position and control the features generation of multiple instances. The Layout-to-Image (L2I) task was introduced to address the positioning challenges by incorporating bounding boxes as spatial control signals, but it still falls short in generating precise instance features. In response, we propose the Instance Feature Generation (IFG) task, which aims to ensure both positional accuracy and feature fidelity in generated instances. To address the IFG task, we introduce the Instance Feature Adapter (IFAdapter). The IFAdapter enhances feature depiction by incorporating additional appearance tokens and utilizing an Instance Semantic Map to align instance-level features with spatial locations. The IFAdapter guides the diffusion process as a plug-and-play module, making it adaptable to various community models. For evaluation, we contribute an IFG benchmark and develop a verification pipeline to objectively compare models' abilities to generate instances with accurate positioning and features. Experimental results demonstrate that IFAdapter outperforms other models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

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.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have significantly enhanced the quality of synthesized images. Despite this progress, evaluations predominantly focus on aesthetic appeal or alignment with text prompts. Consequently, there is limited understanding of whether these models can accurately represent a wide variety of realistic visual entities - a task requiring real-world knowledge. To address this gap, we propose a benchmark focused on evaluating Knowledge-InTensive image generaTion on real-world ENtities (i.e., KITTEN). Using KITTEN, we conduct a systematic study on the fidelity of entities in text-to-image generation models, focusing on their ability to generate a wide range of real-world visual entities, such as landmark buildings, aircraft, plants, and animals. We evaluate the latest text-to-image models and retrieval-augmented customization models using both automatic metrics and carefully-designed human evaluations, with an emphasis on the fidelity of entities in the generated images. Our findings reveal that even the most advanced text-to-image models often fail to generate entities with accurate visual details. Although retrieval-augmented models can enhance the fidelity of entity by incorporating reference images during testing, they often over-rely on these references and struggle to produce novel configurations of the entity as requested in creative text prompts.

Modeling and designing urban building layouts is of significant interest in computer vision, computer graphics, and urban applications. A building layout consists of a set of buildings in city blocks defined by a network of roads. We observe that building layouts are discrete structures, consisting of multiple rows of buildings of various shapes, and are amenable to skeletonization for mapping arbitrary city block shapes to a canonical form. Hence, we propose a fully automatic approach to building layout generation using graph attention networks. Our method generates realistic urban layouts given arbitrary road networks, and enables conditional generation based on learned priors. Our results, including user study, demonstrate superior performance as compared to prior layout generation networks, support arbitrary city block and varying building shapes as demonstrated by generating layouts for 28 large cities.

Based on the Manhattan World assumption, most existing indoor layout estimation schemes focus on recovering layouts from vertically compressed 1D sequences. However, the compression procedure confuses the semantics of different planes, yielding inferior performance with ambiguous interpretability. To address this issue, we propose to disentangle this 1D representation by pre-segmenting orthogonal (vertical and horizontal) planes from a complex scene, explicitly capturing the geometric cues for indoor layout estimation. Considering the symmetry between the floor boundary and ceiling boundary, we also design a soft-flipping fusion strategy to assist the pre-segmentation. Besides, we present a feature assembling mechanism to effectively integrate shallow and deep features with distortion distribution awareness. To compensate for the potential errors in pre-segmentation, we further leverage triple attention to reconstruct the disentangled sequences for better performance. Experiments on four popular benchmarks demonstrate our superiority over existing SoTA solutions, especially on the 3DIoU metric. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijieshen-bjtu/DOPNet.

We address the problem of detecting and erasing furniture from a wide angle photograph of a room. Inpainting large regions of an indoor scene often results in geometric inconsistencies of background elements within the inpaint mask. To address this problem, we utilize perceptual information (e.g. instance segmentation, and room layout) to produce a geometrically consistent empty version of a room. We share important details to make this system viable, such as per-plane inpainting, automatic rectification, and texture refinement. We provide detailed ablation along with qualitative examples, justifying our design choices. We show an application of our system by removing real furniture from a room and redecorating it with virtual furniture.

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper

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

3D scene generation conditioned on text prompts has significantly progressed due to the development of 2D diffusion generation models. However, the textual description of 3D scenes is inherently inaccurate and lacks fine-grained control during training, leading to implausible scene generation. As an intuitive and feasible solution, the 3D layout allows for precise specification of object locations within the scene. To this end, we present a text-to-scene generation method (namely, Layout2Scene) using additional semantic layout as the prompt to inject precise control of 3D object positions. Specifically, we first introduce a scene hybrid representation to decouple objects and backgrounds, which is initialized via a pre-trained text-to-3D model. Then, we propose a two-stage scheme to optimize the geometry and appearance of the initialized scene separately. To fully leverage 2D diffusion priors in geometry and appearance generation, we introduce a semantic-guided geometry diffusion model and a semantic-geometry guided diffusion model which are finetuned on a scene dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate more plausible and realistic scenes as compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, the generated scene allows for flexible yet precise editing, thereby facilitating multiple downstream applications.

Embedding-based methods for reasoning in knowledge hypergraphs learn a representation for each entity and relation. Current methods do not capture the procedural rules underlying the relations in the graph. We propose a simple embedding-based model called ReAlE that performs link prediction in knowledge hypergraphs (generalized knowledge graphs) and can represent high-level abstractions in terms of relational algebra operations. We show theoretically that ReAlE is fully expressive and provide proofs and empirical evidence that it can represent a large subset of the primitive relational algebra operations, namely renaming, projection, set union, selection, and set difference. We also verify experimentally that ReAlE outperforms state-of-the-art models in knowledge hypergraph completion, and in representing each of these primitive relational algebra operations. For the latter experiment, we generate a synthetic knowledge hypergraph, for which we design an algorithm based on the Erdos-R'enyi model for generating random graphs.

Automatic indoor layout generation has attracted increasing attention due to its potential in interior design, virtual environment construction, and embodied AI. Existing methods fall into two categories: prompt-driven approaches that leverage proprietary LLM services (e.g., GPT APIs) and learning-based methods trained on layout data upon diffusion-based models. Prompt-driven methods often suffer from spatial inconsistency and high computational costs, while learning-based methods are typically constrained by coarse relational graphs and limited datasets, restricting their generalization to diverse room categories. In this paper, we revisit LLM-based indoor layout generation and present 3D-SynthPlace, a large-scale dataset that combines synthetic layouts generated via a 'GPT synthesize, Human inspect' pipeline, upgraded from the 3D-Front dataset. 3D-SynthPlace contains nearly 17,000 scenes, covering four common room types -- bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom -- enriched with diverse objects and high-level spatial annotations. We further introduce OptiScene, a strong open-source LLM optimized for indoor layout generation, fine-tuned based on our 3D-SynthPlace dataset through our two-stage training. For the warum-up stage I, we adopt supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which is taught to first generate high-level spatial descriptions then conditionally predict concrete object placements. For the reinforcing stage II, to better align the generated layouts with human design preferences, we apply multi-turn direct preference optimization (DPO), which significantly improving layout quality and generation success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiScene outperforms traditional prompt-driven and learning-based baselines. Moreover, OptiScene shows promising potential in interactive tasks such as scene editing and robot navigation.

Artefact descriptions are the primary carriers of engineering design knowledge that is both an outcome and a driver of the design process. While an artefact could be described in different connotations, the design process requires a description to embody engineering design knowledge, which is expressed in the text through intricate placement of entities and relationships. As large-language models learn from all kinds of text merely as a sequence of characters/tokens, these are yet to generate text that embodies explicit engineering design facts. Existing ontological design theories are less likely to guide the large-language models whose applications are currently limited to ideation and learning purposes. In this article, we explicate engineering design knowledge as knowledge graphs from a large sample of 33,881 patent documents. We examine the constituents of these knowledge graphs to understand the linguistic and structural basis of engineering design knowledge. In terms of linguistic basis, we observe that entities and relationships could be generalised to 64 and 24 linguistic syntaxes. While relationships mainly capture attributes ('of'), structure ('in', 'with'), purpose ('to', 'for'), hierarchy ('include'), exemplification ('such as'), and behaviour ('to', 'from'), the hierarchical relationships could specifically be identified using 75 unique syntaxes. To understand the structural basis, we draw inspiration from various studies on biological/ecological networks and discover motifs from patent knowledge graphs. We identify four 3-node and four 4-node patterns that could further be converged and simplified into sequence [->...->], aggregation [->...<-], and hierarchy [<-...->]. Expected to guide large-language model based design tools, we propose few regulatory precepts for concretising abstract entities and relationships within subgraphs, while explicating hierarchical structures.

Learning-based methods have become increasingly popular in 3D indoor scene synthesis (ISS), showing superior performance over traditional optimization-based approaches. These learning-based methods typically model distributions on simple yet explicit scene representations using generative models. However, due to the oversimplified explicit representations that overlook detailed information and the lack of guidance from multimodal relationships within the scene, most learning-based methods struggle to generate indoor scenes with realistic object arrangements and styles. In this paper, we introduce a new method, Scene Implicit Neural Field (S-INF), for indoor scene synthesis, aiming to learn meaningful representations of multimodal relationships, to enhance the realism of indoor scene synthesis. S-INF assumes that the scene layout is often related to the object-detailed information. It disentangles the multimodal relationships into scene layout relationships and detailed object relationships, fusing them later through implicit neural fields (INFs). By learning specialized scene layout relationships and projecting them into S-INF, we achieve a realistic generation of scene layout. Additionally, S-INF captures dense and detailed object relationships through differentiable rendering, ensuring stylistic consistency across objects. Through extensive experiments on the benchmark 3D-FRONT dataset, we demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance under different types of ISS.

Floorplans provide a compact representation of the building's structure, revealing not only layout information but also detailed semantics such as the locations of windows and doors. However, contemporary floorplan localization techniques mostly focus on matching depth-based structural cues, ignoring the rich semantics communicated within floorplans. In this work, we introduce a semantic-aware localization framework that jointly estimates depth and semantic rays, consolidating over both for predicting a structural-semantic probability volume. Our probability volume is constructed in a coarse-to-fine manner: We first sample a small set of rays to obtain an initial low-resolution probability volume. We then refine these probabilities by performing a denser sampling only in high-probability regions and process the refined values for predicting a 2D location and orientation angle. We conduct an evaluation on two standard floorplan localization benchmarks. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant improvements in recall metrics compared to prior works. Moreover, we show that our framework can easily incorporate additional metadata such as room labels, enabling additional gains in both accuracy and efficiency.

When large language models are aligned via supervised fine-tuning, they may encounter new factual information that was not acquired through pre-training. It is often conjectured that this can teach the model the behavior of hallucinating factually incorrect responses, as the model is trained to generate facts that are not grounded in its pre-existing knowledge. In this work, we study the impact of such exposure to new knowledge on the capability of the fine-tuned model to utilize its pre-existing knowledge. To this end, we design a controlled setup, focused on closed-book QA, where we vary the proportion of the fine-tuning examples that introduce new knowledge. We demonstrate that large language models struggle to acquire new factual knowledge through fine-tuning, as fine-tuning examples that introduce new knowledge are learned significantly slower than those consistent with the model's knowledge. However, we also find that as the examples with new knowledge are eventually learned, they linearly increase the model's tendency to hallucinate. Taken together, our results highlight the risk in introducing new factual knowledge through fine-tuning, and support the view that large language models mostly acquire factual knowledge through pre-training, whereas fine-tuning teaches them to use it more efficiently.

Current human image customization methods leverage Stable Diffusion (SD) for its rich semantic prior. However, since SD is not specifically designed for human-oriented generation, these methods often require extensive fine-tuning on large-scale datasets, which renders them susceptible to overfitting and hinders their ability to personalize individuals with previously unseen styles. Moreover, these methods extensively focus on single-concept human image synthesis and lack the flexibility to customize individuals using multiple given concepts, thereby impeding their broader practical application. This paper proposes MagicFace, a novel training-free method for multi-concept universal-style human image personalized synthesis. Our core idea is to simulate how humans create images given specific concepts, i.e., first establish a semantic layout considering factors such as concepts' shape and posture, then optimize details by comparing with concepts at the pixel level. To implement this process, we introduce a coarse-to-fine generation pipeline, involving two sequential stages: semantic layout construction and concept feature injection. This is achieved by our Reference-aware Self-Attention (RSA) and Region-grouped Blend Attention (RBA) mechanisms. In the first stage, RSA enables the latent image to query features from all reference concepts simultaneously, extracting the overall semantic understanding to facilitate the initial semantic layout establishment. In the second stage, we employ an attention-based semantic segmentation method to pinpoint the latent generated regions of all concepts at each step. Following this, RBA divides the pixels of the latent image into semantic groups, with each group querying fine-grained features from the corresponding reference concept. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our MagicFace.

Large language models are known to suffer from the hallucination problem in that they are prone to output statements that are false or inconsistent, indicating a lack of knowledge. A proposed solution to this is to provide the model with additional data modalities that complements the knowledge obtained through text. We investigate the use of visual data to complement the knowledge of large language models by proposing a method for evaluating visual knowledge transfer to text for uni- or multimodal language models. The method is based on two steps, 1) a novel task querying for knowledge of memory colors, i.e. typical colors of well-known objects, and 2) filtering of model training data to clearly separate knowledge contributions. Additionally, we introduce a model architecture that involves a visual imagination step and evaluate it with our proposed method. We find that our method can successfully be used to measure visual knowledge transfer capabilities in models and that our novel model architecture shows promising results for leveraging multimodal knowledge in a unimodal setting.

Text-to-3D generation has achieved remarkable success via large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. Nevertheless, there is no paradigm for scaling up the methodology to urban scale. Urban scenes, characterized by numerous elements, intricate arrangement relationships, and vast scale, present a formidable barrier to the interpretability of ambiguous textual descriptions for effective model optimization. In this work, we surmount the limitations by introducing a compositional 3D layout representation into text-to-3D paradigm, serving as an additional prior. It comprises a set of semantic primitives with simple geometric structures and explicit arrangement relationships, complementing textual descriptions and enabling steerable generation. Upon this, we propose two modifications -- (1) We introduce Layout-Guided Variational Score Distillation to address model optimization inadequacies. It conditions the score distillation sampling process with geometric and semantic constraints of 3D layouts. (2) To handle the unbounded nature of urban scenes, we represent 3D scene with a Scalable Hash Grid structure, incrementally adapting to the growing scale of urban scenes. Extensive experiments substantiate the capability of our framework to scale text-to-3D generation to large-scale urban scenes that cover over 1000m driving distance for the first time. We also present various scene editing demonstrations, showing the powers of steerable urban scene generation. Website: https://urbanarchitect.github.io.

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

We introduce a new problem KTRL+F, a knowledge-augmented in-document search task that necessitates real-time identification of all semantic targets within a document with the awareness of external sources through a single natural query. This task addresses following unique challenges for in-document search: 1) utilizing knowledge outside the document for extended use of additional information about targets to bridge the semantic gap between the query and the targets, and 2) balancing between real-time applicability with the performance. We analyze various baselines in KTRL+F and find there are limitations of existing models, such as hallucinations, low latency, or difficulties in leveraging external knowledge. Therefore we propose a Knowledge-Augmented Phrase Retrieval model that shows a promising balance between speed and performance by simply augmenting external knowledge embedding in phrase embedding. Additionally, we conduct a user study to verify whether solving KTRL+F can enhance search experience of users. It demonstrates that even with our simple model users can reduce the time for searching with less queries and reduced extra visits to other sources for collecting evidence. We encourage the research community to work on KTRL+F to enhance more efficient in-document information access.

We propose an end-to-end variational generative model for scene layout synthesis conditioned on scene graphs. Unlike unconditional scene layout generation, we use scene graphs as an abstract but general representation to guide the synthesis of diverse scene layouts that satisfy relationships included in the scene graph. This gives rise to more flexible control over the synthesis process, allowing various forms of inputs such as scene layouts extracted from sentences or inferred from a single color image. Using our conditional layout synthesizer, we can generate various layouts that share the same structure of the input example. In addition to this conditional generation design, we also integrate a differentiable rendering module that enables layout refinement using only 2D projections of the scene. Given a depth and a semantics map, the differentiable rendering module enables optimizing over the synthesized layout to fit the given input in an analysis-by-synthesis fashion. Experiments suggest that our model achieves higher accuracy and diversity in conditional scene synthesis and allows exemplar-based scene generation from various input forms.

Significant focus has been placed on integrating large language models (LLMs) with various tools in developing general-purpose agents. This poses a challenge to LLMs' tool-use capabilities. However, there are evident gaps between existing tool-use evaluations and real-world scenarios. Current evaluations often use AI-generated queries, single-step tasks, dummy tools, and text-only interactions, failing to reveal the agents' real-world problem-solving abilities effectively. To address this, we propose GTA, a benchmark for General Tool Agents, featuring three main aspects: (i) Real user queries: human-written queries with simple real-world objectives but implicit tool-use, requiring the LLM to reason the suitable tools and plan the solution steps. (ii) Real deployed tools: an evaluation platform equipped with tools across perception, operation, logic, and creativity categories to evaluate the agents' actual task execution performance. (iii) Real multimodal inputs: authentic image files, such as spatial scenes, web page screenshots, tables, code snippets, and printed/handwritten materials, used as the query contexts to align with real-world scenarios closely. We design 229 real-world tasks and executable tool chains to evaluate mainstream LLMs. Our findings show that real-world user queries are challenging for existing LLMs, with GPT-4 completing less than 50% of the tasks and most LLMs achieving below 25%. This evaluation reveals the bottlenecks in the tool-use capabilities of current LLMs in real-world scenarios, which provides future direction for advancing general-purpose tool agents. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/open-compass/GTA.

Conceptual knowledge is fundamental to human cognition and knowledge bases. However, existing knowledge probing works only focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and ignore conceptual knowledge. Since conceptual knowledge often appears as implicit commonsense behind texts, designing probes for conceptual knowledge is hard. Inspired by knowledge representation schemata, we comprehensively evaluate conceptual knowledge of PLMs by designing three tasks to probe whether PLMs organize entities by conceptual similarities, learn conceptual properties, and conceptualize entities in contexts, respectively. For the tasks, we collect and annotate 24k data instances covering 393 concepts, which is COPEN, a COnceptual knowledge Probing bENchmark. Extensive experiments on different sizes and types of PLMs show that existing PLMs systematically lack conceptual knowledge and suffer from various spurious correlations. We believe this is a critical bottleneck for realizing human-like cognition in PLMs. COPEN and our codes are publicly released at https://github.com/THU-KEG/COPEN.

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

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

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.

Language models are known to encode a great amount of factual knowledge through pretraining. However, such knowledge might be insufficient to cater to user requests, requiring the model to integrate external knowledge sources and adhere to user-provided specifications. When answering questions about ongoing events, the model should use recent news articles to update its response; when asked to provide recommendations, the model should prioritize user specifications over retrieved product reviews; when some facts are edited in the model, the updated facts should override all prior knowledge learned by the model even if they are conflicting. In all of the cases above, the model faces a decision between its own parametric knowledge, (retrieved) contextual knowledge, and user instruction knowledge. In this paper, we (1) unify such settings into the problem of knowledge preference and define a three-level preference hierarchy over these knowledge sources; (2) compile a collection of existing datasets IfQA, MQuAKE, and MRQA covering a combination of settings (with/without user specifications, with/without context documents) to systematically evaluate how well models obey the intended knowledge preference; and (3) propose a dataset synthesis method that composes diverse question-answer pairs with user assumptions and related context to directly fine-tune LMs for instilling the hierarchy of knowledge. We demonstrate that a 7B model, fine-tuned on only a few thousand examples automatically generated by our proposed method, effectively achieves superior performance (more than 18% improvement across all evaluation benchmarks) in adhering to the desired knowledge preference hierarchy.

Multimodal LLMs are the natural evolution of LLMs, and enlarge their capabilities so as to work beyond the pure textual modality. As research is being carried out to design novel architectures and vision-and-language adapters, in this paper we concentrate on endowing such models with the capability of answering questions that require external knowledge. Our approach, termed Wiki-LLaVA, aims at integrating an external knowledge source of multimodal documents, which is accessed through a hierarchical retrieval pipeline. Relevant passages, using this approach, are retrieved from the external knowledge source and employed as additional context for the LLM, augmenting the effectiveness and precision of generated dialogues. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets tailored for visual question answering with external data and demonstrate the appropriateness of our approach.

Indoor scene synthesis aims to automatically produce plausible, realistic and diverse 3D indoor scenes, especially given arbitrary user requirements. Recently, the promising generalization ability of pre-trained large language models (LLM) assist in open-vocabulary indoor scene synthesis. However, the challenge lies in converting the LLM-generated outputs into reasonable and physically feasible scene layouts. In this paper, we propose to generate hierarchically structured scene descriptions with LLM and then compute the scene layouts. Specifically, we train a hierarchy-aware network to infer the fine-grained relative positions between objects and design a divide-and-conquer optimization to solve for scene layouts. The advantages of using hierarchically structured scene representation are two-fold. First, the hierarchical structure provides a rough grounding for object arrangement, which alleviates contradictory placements with dense relations and enhances the generalization ability of the network to infer fine-grained placements. Second, it naturally supports the divide-and-conquer optimization, by first arranging the sub-scenes and then the entire scene, to more effectively solve for a feasible layout. We conduct extensive comparison experiments and ablation studies with both qualitative and quantitative evaluations to validate the effectiveness of our key designs with the hierarchically structured scene representation. Our approach can generate more reasonable scene layouts while better aligned with the user requirements and LLM descriptions. We also present open-vocabulary scene synthesis and interactive scene design results to show the strength of our approach in the applications.

Answer grounding is the task of locating relevant visual evidence for the Visual Question Answering task. While a wide variety of attention methods have been introduced for this task, they suffer from the following three problems: designs that do not allow the usage of pre-trained networks and do not benefit from large data pre-training, custom designs that are not based on well-grounded previous designs, therefore limiting the learning power of the network, or complicated designs that make it challenging to re-implement or improve them. In this paper, we propose a novel architectural block, which we term Sentence Attention Block, to solve these problems. The proposed block re-calibrates channel-wise image feature-maps by explicitly modeling inter-dependencies between the image feature-maps and sentence embedding. We visually demonstrate how this block filters out irrelevant feature-maps channels based on sentence embedding. We start our design with a well-known attention method, and by making minor modifications, we improve the results to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. The flexibility of our method makes it easy to use different pre-trained backbone networks, and its simplicity makes it easy to understand and be re-implemented. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the TextVQA-X, VQS, VQA-X, and VizWiz-VQA-Grounding datasets. We perform multiple ablation studies to show the effectiveness of our design choices.

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

Visual language is a system of communication that conveys information through symbols, shapes, and spatial arrangements. Diagrams are a typical example of a visual language depicting complex concepts and their relationships in the form of an image. The symbolic nature of diagrams presents significant challenges for building models capable of understanding them. Yet, recent studies seem to suggest that Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can even tackle complex reasoning tasks involving diagrams. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon by developing a comprehensive test suite to evaluate the diagram comprehension capability of LVLMs. Our test suite uses a variety of questions focused on concept entities and their relationships over a set of synthetic as well as real diagrams across several domains to evaluate the recognition and reasoning abilities of models. Our evaluation of three LVLMs (GPT-4V, GPT-4o, and Gemini) shows that while these models can accurately identify and reason about entities, their ability to understand relationships is notably limited. Further testing reveals that the decent performance on diagram understanding largely stems from leveraging their background knowledge as shortcuts to identify and reason about the relational information. Thus, we conclude that LVLMs have a limited capability for genuine diagram understanding, and their impressive performance in diagram reasoning is an illusion emanating from other confounding factors, such as the background knowledge in the models.

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.

Incorporating domain-specific priors in search and navigation tasks has shown promising results in improving generalization and sample complexity over end-to-end trained policies. In this work, we study how object embeddings that capture spatial semantic priors can guide search and navigation tasks in a structured environment. We know that humans can search for an object like a book, or a plate in an unseen house, based on the spatial semantics of bigger objects detected. For example, a book is likely to be on a bookshelf or a table, whereas a plate is likely to be in a cupboard or dishwasher. We propose a method to incorporate such spatial semantic awareness in robots by leveraging pre-trained language models and multi-relational knowledge bases as object embeddings. We demonstrate using these object embeddings to search a query object in an unseen indoor environment. We measure the performance of these embeddings in an indoor simulator (AI2Thor). We further evaluate different pre-trained embedding onSuccess Rate(SR) and success weighted by Path Length(SPL).

Real-world design tasks - such as picture book creation, film storyboard development using character sets, photo retouching, visual effects, and font transfer - are highly diverse and complex, requiring deep interpretation and extraction of various elements from instructions, descriptions, and reference images. The resulting images often implicitly capture key features from references or user inputs, making it challenging to develop models that can effectively address such varied tasks. While existing visual generative models can produce high-quality images based on prompts, they face significant limitations in professional design scenarios that involve varied forms and multiple inputs and outputs, even when enhanced with adapters like ControlNets and LoRAs. To address this, we introduce IDEA-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing 100 real-world design tasks, including rendering, visual effects, storyboarding, picture books, fonts, style-based, and identity-preserving generation, with 275 test cases to thoroughly evaluate a model's general-purpose generation capabilities. Notably, even the best-performing model only achieves 22.48 on IDEA-Bench, while the best general-purpose model only achieves 6.81. We provide a detailed analysis of these results, highlighting the inherent challenges and providing actionable directions for improvement. Additionally, we provide a subset of 18 representative tasks equipped with multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based auto-evaluation techniques to facilitate rapid model development and comparison. We releases the benchmark data, evaluation toolkits, and an online leaderboard at https://github.com/ali-vilab/IDEA-Bench, aiming to drive the advancement of generative models toward more versatile and applicable intelligent design systems.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various complex tasks, yet they still suffer from hallucinations. Introducing external knowledge, such as knowledge graph, can enhance the LLMs' ability to provide factual answers. LLMs have the ability to interactively explore knowledge graphs. However, most approaches have been affected by insufficient internal knowledge excavation in LLMs, limited generation of trustworthy knowledge reasoning paths, and a vague integration between internal and external knowledge. Therefore, we propose KnowPath, a knowledge-enhanced large model framework driven by the collaboration of internal and external knowledge. It relies on the internal knowledge of the LLM to guide the exploration of interpretable directed subgraphs in external knowledge graphs, better integrating the two knowledge sources for more accurate reasoning. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets confirm the superiority of KnowPath.

Addressing the limitations of text as a source of accurate layout representation in text-conditional diffusion models, many works incorporate additional signals to condition certain attributes within a generated image. Although successful, previous works do not account for the specific localization of said attributes extended into the three dimensional plane. In this context, we present a conditional diffusion model that integrates control over three-dimensional object placement with disentangled representations of global stylistic semantics from multiple exemplar images. Specifically, we first introduce depth disentanglement training to leverage the relative depth of objects as an estimator, allowing the model to identify the absolute positions of unseen objects through the use of synthetic image triplets. We also introduce soft guidance, a method for imposing global semantics onto targeted regions without the use of any additional localization cues. Our integrated framework, Compose and Conquer (CnC), unifies these techniques to localize multiple conditions in a disentangled manner. We demonstrate that our approach allows perception of objects at varying depths while offering a versatile framework for composing localized objects with different global semantics. Code: https://github.com/tomtom1103/compose-and-conquer/

Internet image collections containing photos captured by crowds of photographers show promise for enabling digital exploration of large-scale tourist landmarks. However, prior works focus primarily on geometric reconstruction and visualization, neglecting the key role of language in providing a semantic interface for navigation and fine-grained understanding. In constrained 3D domains, recent methods have leveraged vision-and-language models as a strong prior of 2D visual semantics. While these models display an excellent understanding of broad visual semantics, they struggle with unconstrained photo collections depicting such tourist landmarks, as they lack expert knowledge of the architectural domain. In this work, we present a localization system that connects neural representations of scenes depicting large-scale landmarks with text describing a semantic region within the scene, by harnessing the power of SOTA vision-and-language models with adaptations for understanding landmark scene semantics. To bolster such models with fine-grained knowledge, we leverage large-scale Internet data containing images of similar landmarks along with weakly-related textual information. Our approach is built upon the premise that images physically grounded in space can provide a powerful supervision signal for localizing new concepts, whose semantics may be unlocked from Internet textual metadata with large language models. We use correspondences between views of scenes to bootstrap spatial understanding of these semantics, providing guidance for 3D-compatible segmentation that ultimately lifts to a volumetric scene representation. Our results show that HaLo-NeRF can accurately localize a variety of semantic concepts related to architectural landmarks, surpassing the results of other 3D models as well as strong 2D segmentation baselines. Our project page is at https://tau-vailab.github.io/HaLo-NeRF/.

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

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as GPT-4, have achieved remarkable success across various fields. However, there are few studies on 3D indoor scene generation with VLMs. This paper considers this task as a planning problem subject to spatial and layout common sense constraints. To solve the problem with a VLM, we propose a new global-local tree search algorithm. Globally, the method places each object sequentially and explores multiple placements during each placement process, where the problem space is represented as a tree. To reduce the depth of the tree, we decompose the scene structure hierarchically, i.e. room level, region level, floor object level, and supported object level. The algorithm independently generates the floor objects in different regions and supported objects placed on different floor objects. Locally, we also decompose the sub-task, the placement of each object, into multiple steps. The algorithm searches the tree of problem space. To leverage the VLM model to produce positions of objects, we discretize the top-down view space as a dense grid and fill each cell with diverse emojis to make to cells distinct. We prompt the VLM with the emoji grid and the VLM produces a reasonable location for the object by describing the position with the name of emojis. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results illustrate our approach generates more plausible 3D scenes than state-of-the-art approaches. Our source code is available at https://github.com/dw-dengwei/TreeSearchGen .

We address 2D floorplan reconstruction from 3D scans. Existing approaches typically employ heuristically designed multi-stage pipelines. Instead, we formulate floorplan reconstruction as a single-stage structured prediction task: find a variable-size set of polygons, which in turn are variable-length sequences of ordered vertices. To solve it we develop a novel Transformer architecture that generates polygons of multiple rooms in parallel, in a holistic manner without hand-crafted intermediate stages. The model features two-level queries for polygons and corners, and includes polygon matching to make the network end-to-end trainable. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art for two challenging datasets, Structured3D and SceneCAD, along with significantly faster inference than previous methods. Moreover, it can readily be extended to predict additional information, i.e., semantic room types and architectural elements like doors and windows. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/ywyue/RoomFormer.

3D room layout estimation by a single panorama using deep neural networks has made great progress. However, previous approaches can not obtain efficient geometry awareness of room layout with the only latitude of boundaries or horizon-depth. We present that using horizon-depth along with room height can obtain omnidirectional-geometry awareness of room layout in both horizontal and vertical directions. In addition, we propose a planar-geometry aware loss function with normals and gradients of normals to supervise the planeness of walls and turning of corners. We propose an efficient network, LGT-Net, for room layout estimation, which contains a novel Transformer architecture called SWG-Transformer to model geometry relations. SWG-Transformer consists of (Shifted) Window Blocks and Global Blocks to combine the local and global geometry relations. Moreover, we design a novel relative position embedding of Transformer to enhance the spatial identification ability for the panorama. Experiments show that the proposed LGT-Net achieves better performance than current state-of-the-arts (SOTA) on benchmark datasets.

Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible interface that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion. However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user to "point to" and access specific regions within images. This capability is important not only to support reference-grounded VL benchmarks, but also, for practical applications that require precise within-image reasoning. We build Localized Visual Commonsense models, which allow users to specify (multiple) regions as input. We train our model by sampling localized commonsense knowledge from a large language model (LLM): specifically, we prompt an LLM to collect commonsense knowledge given a global literal image description and a local literal region description automatically generated by a set of VL models. With a separately trained critic model that selects high-quality examples, we find that training on the localized commonsense corpus can successfully distill existing VL models to support a reference-as-input interface. Empirical results and human evaluations in a zero-shot setup demonstrate that our distillation method results in more precise VL models of reasoning compared to a baseline of passing a generated referring expression to an LLM.

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

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are central to our interaction with digital devices. Recently, growing efforts have been made to build models for various GUI understanding tasks. However, these efforts largely overlook an important GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points, which we name the Screen Point-and-Read (SPR) task. This task is predominantly handled by rigid accessible screen reading tools, in great need of new models driven by advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In this paper, we propose a Tree-of-Lens (ToL) agent, utilizing a novel ToL grounding mechanism, to address the SPR task. Based on the input point coordinate and the corresponding GUI screenshot, our ToL agent constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree. Based on the tree, our ToL agent not only comprehends the content of the indicated area but also articulates the layout and spatial relationships between elements. Such layout information is crucial for accurately interpreting information on the screen, distinguishing our ToL agent from other screen reading tools. We also thoroughly evaluate the ToL agent against other baselines on a newly proposed SPR benchmark, which includes GUIs from mobile, web, and operating systems. Last but not least, we test the ToL agent on mobile GUI navigation tasks, demonstrating its utility in identifying incorrect actions along the path of agent execution trajectories. Code and data: screen-point-and-read.github.io

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).

Document layout analysis is a known problem to the documents research community and has been vastly explored yielding a multitude of solutions ranging from text mining, and recognition to graph-based representation, visual feature extraction, etc. However, most of the existing works have ignored the crucial fact regarding the scarcity of labeled data. With growing internet connectivity to personal life, an enormous amount of documents had been available in the public domain and thus making data annotation a tedious task. We address this challenge using self-supervision and unlike, the few existing self-supervised document segmentation approaches which use text mining and textual labels, we use a complete vision-based approach in pre-training without any ground-truth label or its derivative. Instead, we generate pseudo-layouts from the document images to pre-train an image encoder to learn the document object representation and localization in a self-supervised framework before fine-tuning it with an object detection model. We show that our pipeline sets a new benchmark in this context and performs at par with the existing methods and the supervised counterparts, if not outperforms. The code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/MaitySubhajit/SelfDocSeg

Scene synthesis and editing has emerged as a promising direction in computer graphics. Current trained approaches for 3D indoor scenes either oversimplify object semantics through one-hot class encodings (e.g., 'chair' or 'table'), require masked diffusion for editing, ignore room boundaries, or rely on floor plan renderings that fail to capture complex layouts. In contrast, LLM-based methods enable richer semantics via natural language (e.g., 'modern studio with light wood furniture') but do not support editing, remain limited to rectangular layouts or rely on weak spatial reasoning from implicit world models. We introduce ReSpace, a generative framework for text-driven 3D indoor scene synthesis and editing using autoregressive language models. Our approach features a compact structured scene representation with explicit room boundaries that frames scene editing as a next-token prediction task. We leverage a dual-stage training approach combining supervised fine-tuning and preference alignment, enabling a specially trained language model for object addition that accounts for user instructions, spatial geometry, object semantics, and scene-level composition. For scene editing, we employ a zero-shot LLM to handle object removal and prompts for addition. We further introduce a novel voxelization-based evaluation that captures fine-grained geometry beyond 3D bounding boxes. Experimental results surpass state-of-the-art on object addition while maintaining competitive results on full scene synthesis.

Physically realistic materials are pivotal in augmenting the realism of 3D assets across various applications and lighting conditions. However, existing 3D assets and generative models often lack authentic material properties. Manual assignment of materials using graphic software is a tedious and time-consuming task. In this paper, we exploit advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly GPT-4V, to present a novel approach, Make-it-Real: 1) We demonstrate that GPT-4V can effectively recognize and describe materials, allowing the construction of a detailed material library. 2) Utilizing a combination of visual cues and hierarchical text prompts, GPT-4V precisely identifies and aligns materials with the corresponding components of 3D objects. 3) The correctly matched materials are then meticulously applied as reference for the new SVBRDF material generation according to the original diffuse map, significantly enhancing their visual authenticity. Make-it-Real offers a streamlined integration into the 3D content creation workflow, showcasing its utility as an essential tool for developers of 3D assets.

Visual Document Understanding has become essential with the increase of text-rich visual content. This field poses significant challenges due to the need for effective integration of visual perception and textual comprehension, particularly across diverse document types with complex layouts. Moreover, existing fine-tuning datasets for this domain often fall short in providing the detailed contextual information for robust understanding, leading to hallucinations and limited comprehension of spatial relationships among visual elements. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative pipeline that utilizes adaptive generation of markup languages, such as Markdown, JSON, HTML, and TiKZ, to build highly structured document representations and deliver contextually-grounded responses. We introduce two fine-grained structured datasets: DocMark-Pile, comprising approximately 3.8M pretraining data pairs for document parsing, and DocMark-Instruct, featuring 624k fine-tuning data annotations for grounded instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing state-of-theart MLLMs across a range of visual document understanding benchmarks, facilitating advanced reasoning and comprehension capabilities in complex visual scenarios. Our code and models are released at https://github. com/Euphoria16/DocMark.

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.

Designing 3D scenes is traditionally a challenging task that demands both artistic expertise and proficiency with complex software. Recent advances in text-to-3D generation have greatly simplified this process by letting users create scenes based on simple text descriptions. However, as these methods generally require extra training or in-context learning, their performance is often hindered by the limited availability of high-quality 3D data. In contrast, modern text-to-image models learned from web-scale images can generate scenes with diverse, reliable spatial layouts and consistent, visually appealing styles. Our key insight is that instead of learning directly from 3D scenes, we can leverage generated 2D images as an intermediary to guide 3D synthesis. In light of this, we introduce ArtiScene, a training-free automated pipeline for scene design that integrates the flexibility of free-form text-to-image generation with the diversity and reliability of 2D intermediary layouts. First, we generate 2D images from a scene description, then extract the shape and appearance of objects to create 3D models. These models are assembled into the final scene using geometry, position, and pose information derived from the same intermediary image. Being generalizable to a wide range of scenes and styles, ArtiScene outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks by a large margin in layout and aesthetic quality by quantitative metrics. It also averages a 74.89% winning rate in extensive user studies and 95.07% in GPT-4o evaluation. Project page: https://artiscene-cvpr.github.io/

Text-to-Image (T2I) models are capable of generating high-quality artistic creations and visual content. However, existing research and evaluation standards predominantly focus on image realism and shallow text-image alignment, lacking a comprehensive assessment of complex semantic understanding and world knowledge integration in text to image generation. To address this challenge, we propose WISE, the first benchmark specifically designed for World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation. WISE moves beyond simple word-pixel mapping by challenging models with 1000 meticulously crafted prompts across 25 sub-domains in cultural common sense, spatio-temporal reasoning, and natural science. To overcome the limitations of traditional CLIP metric, we introduce WiScore, a novel quantitative metric for assessing knowledge-image alignment. Through comprehensive testing of 20 models (10 dedicated T2I models and 10 unified multimodal models) using 1,000 structured prompts spanning 25 subdomains, our findings reveal significant limitations in their ability to effectively integrate and apply world knowledge during image generation, highlighting critical pathways for enhancing knowledge incorporation and application in next-generation T2I models. Code and data are available at https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/WISE.

Language models~(LMs) gradually become general-purpose interfaces in the interactive and embodied world, where the understanding of physical concepts is an essential prerequisite. However, it is not yet clear whether LMs can understand physical concepts in the human world. To investigate this, we design a benchmark VEC that covers the tasks of (i) Visual concepts, such as the shape and material of objects, and (ii) Embodied Concepts, learned from the interaction with the world such as the temperature of objects. Our zero (few)-shot prompting results show that the understanding of certain visual concepts emerges as scaling up LMs, but there are still basic concepts to which the scaling law does not apply. For example, OPT-175B performs close to humans with a zero-shot accuracy of 85\% on the material concept, yet behaves like random guessing on the mass concept. Instead, vision-augmented LMs such as CLIP and BLIP achieve a human-level understanding of embodied concepts. Analysis indicates that the rich semantics in visual representation can serve as a valuable source of embodied knowledge. Inspired by this, we propose a distillation method to transfer embodied knowledge from VLMs to LMs, achieving performance gain comparable with that by scaling up the parameters of LMs 134x. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/TobiasLee/VEC

The generation of large-scale urban layouts has garnered substantial interest across various disciplines. Prior methods have utilized procedural generation requiring manual rule coding or deep learning needing abundant data. However, prior approaches have not considered the context-sensitive nature of urban layout generation. Our approach addresses this gap by leveraging a canonical graph representation for the entire city, which facilitates scalability and captures the multi-layer semantics inherent in urban layouts. We introduce a novel graph-based masked autoencoder (GMAE) for city-scale urban layout generation. The method encodes attributed buildings, city blocks, communities and cities into a unified graph structure, enabling self-supervised masked training for graph autoencoder. Additionally, we employ scheduled iterative sampling for 2.5D layout generation, prioritizing the generation of important city blocks and buildings. Our approach achieves good realism, semantic consistency, and correctness across the heterogeneous urban styles in 330 US cities. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/Arking1995/COHO.

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.

Generating realistic 3D scenes is challenging due to the complexity of room layouts and object geometries.We propose a sketch based knowledge enhanced diffusion architecture (SEK) for generating customized, diverse, and plausible 3D scenes. SEK conditions the denoising process with a hand-drawn sketch of the target scene and cues from an object relationship knowledge base. We first construct an external knowledge base containing object relationships and then leverage knowledge enhanced graph reasoning to assist our model in understanding hand-drawn sketches. A scene is represented as a combination of 3D objects and their relationships, and then incrementally diffused to reach a Gaussian distribution.We propose a 3D denoising scene transformer that learns to reverse the diffusion process, conditioned by a hand-drawn sketch along with knowledge cues, to regressively generate the scene including the 3D object instances as well as their layout. Experiments on the 3D-FRONT dataset show that our model improves FID, CKL by 17.41%, 37.18% in 3D scene generation and FID, KID by 19.12%, 20.06% in 3D scene completion compared to the nearest competitor DiffuScene.

Image visual try-on aims at transferring a target clothing image onto a reference person, and has become a hot topic in recent years. Prior arts usually focus on preserving the character of a clothing image (e.g. texture, logo, embroidery) when warping it to arbitrary human pose. However, it remains a big challenge to generate photo-realistic try-on images when large occlusions and human poses are presented in the reference person. To address this issue, we propose a novel visual try-on network, namely Adaptive Content Generating and Preserving Network (ACGPN). In particular, ACGPN first predicts semantic layout of the reference image that will be changed after try-on (e.g. long sleeve shirtrightarrowarm, armrightarrowjacket), and then determines whether its image content needs to be generated or preserved according to the predicted semantic layout, leading to photo-realistic try-on and rich clothing details. ACGPN generally involves three major modules. First, a semantic layout generation module utilizes semantic segmentation of the reference image to progressively predict the desired semantic layout after try-on. Second, a clothes warping module warps clothing images according to the generated semantic layout, where a second-order difference constraint is introduced to stabilize the warping process during training. Third, an inpainting module for content fusion integrates all information (e.g. reference image, semantic layout, warped clothes) to adaptively produce each semantic part of human body. In comparison to the state-of-the-art methods, ACGPN can generate photo-realistic images with much better perceptual quality and richer fine-details.

The remarkable capabilities of modern large language models are rooted in their vast repositories of knowledge encoded within their parameters, enabling them to perceive the world and engage in reasoning. The inner workings of how these models store knowledge have long been a subject of intense interest and investigation among researchers. To date, most studies have concentrated on isolated components within these models, such as the Multilayer Perceptrons and attention head. In this paper, we delve into the computation graph of the language model to uncover the knowledge circuits that are instrumental in articulating specific knowledge. The experiments, conducted with GPT2 and TinyLLAMA, has allowed us to observe how certain information heads, relation heads, and Multilayer Perceptrons collaboratively encode knowledge within the model. Moreover, we evaluate the impact of current knowledge editing techniques on these knowledge circuits, providing deeper insights into the functioning and constraints of these editing methodologies. Finally, we utilize knowledge circuits to analyze and interpret language model behaviors such as hallucinations and in-context learning. We believe the knowledge circuit holds potential for advancing our understanding of Transformers and guiding the improved design of knowledge editing. Code and data are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowledgeCircuits.

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.

The generation of 3D scenes from user-specified conditions offers a promising avenue for alleviating the production burden in 3D applications. Previous studies required significant effort to realize the desired scene, owing to limited control conditions. We propose a method for controlling and generating 3D scenes under multimodal conditions using partial images, layout information represented in the top view, and text prompts. Combining these conditions to generate a 3D scene involves the following significant difficulties: (1) the creation of large datasets, (2) reflection on the interaction of multimodal conditions, and (3) domain dependence of the layout conditions. We decompose the process of 3D scene generation into 2D image generation from the given conditions and 3D scene generation from 2D images. 2D image generation is achieved by fine-tuning a pretrained text-to-image model with a small artificial dataset of partial images and layouts, and 3D scene generation is achieved by layout-conditioned depth estimation and neural radiance fields (NeRF), thereby avoiding the creation of large datasets. The use of a common representation of spatial information using 360-degree images allows for the consideration of multimodal condition interactions and reduces the domain dependence of the layout control. The experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrated that the proposed method can generate 3D scenes in diverse domains, from indoor to outdoor, according to multimodal conditions.

Recent advances in multi-modal generative models have enabled significant progress in instruction-based image editing. However, while these models produce visually plausible outputs, their capacity for knowledge-based reasoning editing tasks remains under-explored. In this paper, we introduce KRIS-Bench (Knowledge-based Reasoning in Image-editing Systems Benchmark), a diagnostic benchmark designed to assess models through a cognitively informed lens. Drawing from educational theory, KRIS-Bench categorizes editing tasks across three foundational knowledge types: Factual, Conceptual, and Procedural. Based on this taxonomy, we design 22 representative tasks spanning 7 reasoning dimensions and release 1,267 high-quality annotated editing instances. To support fine-grained evaluation, we propose a comprehensive protocol that incorporates a novel Knowledge Plausibility metric, enhanced by knowledge hints and calibrated through human studies. Empirical results on 10 state-of-the-art models reveal significant gaps in reasoning performance, highlighting the need for knowledge-centric benchmarks to advance the development of intelligent image editing systems.

Despite significant popularity, Large-language Models (LLMs) require explicit, contextual facts to support domain-specific knowledge-intensive tasks in the design process. The applications built using LLMs should hence adopt Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to better suit the design process. In this article, we present a data-driven method to identify explicit facts from patent documents that provide standard descriptions of over 8 million artefacts. In our method, we train roBERTa Transformer-based sequence classification models using our dataset of 44,227 sentences and facts. Upon classifying tokens in a sentence as entities or relationships, our method uses another classifier to identify specific relationship tokens for a given pair of entities so that explicit facts of the form head entity :: relationship :: tail entity are identified. In the benchmark approaches for constructing facts, we use linear classifiers and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) both incorporating BERT Transformer-based token embeddings to predict associations among the entities and relationships. We apply our method to 4,870 fan system related patents and populate a knowledge base of around 3 million facts. Upon retrieving the facts representing generalisable domain knowledge and the knowledge of specific subsystems and issues, we demonstrate how these facts contextualise LLMs for generating text that is more relevant to the design process.

Comprehending natural language instructions is a charming property for 3D indoor scene synthesis systems. Existing methods directly model object joint distributions and express object relations implicitly within a scene, thereby hindering the controllability of generation. We introduce InstructScene, a novel generative framework that integrates a semantic graph prior and a layout decoder to improve controllability and fidelity for 3D scene synthesis. The proposed semantic graph prior jointly learns scene appearances and layout distributions, exhibiting versatility across various downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. To facilitate the benchmarking for text-driven 3D scene synthesis, we curate a high-quality dataset of scene-instruction pairs with large language and multimodal models. Extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin. Thorough ablation studies confirm the efficacy of crucial design components. Project page: https://chenguolin.github.io/projects/InstructScene.

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 .

Solving complex visual tasks such as "Who invented the musical instrument on the right?" involves a composition of skills: understanding space, recognizing instruments, and also retrieving prior knowledge. Recent work shows promise by decomposing such tasks using a large language model (LLM) into an executable program that invokes specialized vision models. However, generated programs are error-prone: they omit necessary steps, include spurious ones, and are unable to recover when the specialized models give incorrect outputs. Moreover, they require loading multiple models, incurring high latency and computation costs. We propose Visual Program Distillation (VPD), an instruction tuning framework that produces a vision-language model (VLM) capable of solving complex visual tasks with a single forward pass. VPD distills the reasoning ability of LLMs by using them to sample multiple candidate programs, which are then executed and verified to identify a correct one. It translates each correct program into a language description of the reasoning steps, which are then distilled into a VLM. Extensive experiments show that VPD improves the VLM's ability to count, understand spatial relations, and reason compositionally. Our VPD-trained PaLI-X outperforms all prior VLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance across complex vision tasks, including MMBench, OK-VQA, A-OKVQA, TallyQA, POPE, and Hateful Memes. An evaluation with human annotators also confirms that VPD improves model response factuality and consistency. Finally, experiments on content moderation demonstrate that VPD is also helpful for adaptation to real-world applications with limited data.

Understanding 3D scenes from multi-view inputs has been proven to alleviate the view discrepancy issue in 3D visual grounding. However, existing methods normally neglect the view cues embedded in the text modality and fail to weigh the relative importance of different views. In this paper, we propose ViewRefer, a multi-view framework for 3D visual grounding exploring how to grasp the view knowledge from both text and 3D modalities. For the text branch, ViewRefer leverages the diverse linguistic knowledge of large-scale language models, e.g., GPT, to expand a single grounding text to multiple geometry-consistent descriptions. Meanwhile, in the 3D modality, a transformer fusion module with inter-view attention is introduced to boost the interaction of objects across views. On top of that, we further present a set of learnable multi-view prototypes, which memorize scene-agnostic knowledge for different views, and enhance the framework from two perspectives: a view-guided attention module for more robust text features, and a view-guided scoring strategy during the final prediction. With our designed paradigm, ViewRefer achieves superior performance on three benchmarks and surpasses the second-best by +2.8%, +1.5%, and +1.35% on Sr3D, Nr3D, and ScanRefer.

Generating images from text involving complex and novel object arrangements remains a significant challenge for current text-to-image (T2I) models. Although prior layout-based methods improve object arrangements using spatial constraints with 2D layouts, they often struggle to capture 3D positioning and sacrifice quality and coherence. In this work, we introduce ComposeAnything, a novel framework for improving compositional image generation without retraining existing T2I models. Our approach first leverages the chain-of-thought reasoning abilities of LLMs to produce 2.5D semantic layouts from text, consisting of 2D object bounding boxes enriched with depth information and detailed captions. Based on this layout, we generate a spatial and depth aware coarse composite of objects that captures the intended composition, serving as a strong and interpretable prior that replaces stochastic noise initialization in diffusion-based T2I models. This prior guides the denoising process through object prior reinforcement and spatial-controlled denoising, enabling seamless generation of compositional objects and coherent backgrounds, while allowing refinement of inaccurate priors. ComposeAnything outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the T2I-CompBench and NSR-1K benchmarks for prompts with 2D/3D spatial arrangements, high object counts, and surreal compositions. Human evaluations further demonstrate that our model generates high-quality images with compositions that faithfully reflect the text.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently driven striking performance improvements across a range of natural language processing tasks. The factual knowledge acquired during pretraining and instruction tuning can be useful in various downstream tasks, such as question answering, and language generation. Unlike conventional Knowledge Bases (KBs) that explicitly store factual knowledge, LLMs implicitly store facts in their parameters. Content generated by the LLMs can often exhibit inaccuracies or deviations from the truth, due to facts that can be incorrectly induced or become obsolete over time. To this end, we aim to comprehensively evaluate the extent and scope of factual knowledge within LLMs by designing the benchmark Pinocchio. Pinocchio contains 20K diverse factual questions that span different sources, timelines, domains, regions, and languages. Furthermore, we investigate whether LLMs are able to compose multiple facts, update factual knowledge temporally, reason over multiple pieces of facts, identify subtle factual differences, and resist adversarial examples. Extensive experiments on different sizes and types of LLMs show that existing LLMs still lack factual knowledge and suffer from various spurious correlations. We believe this is a critical bottleneck for realizing trustworthy artificial intelligence. The dataset Pinocchio and our codes will be publicly available.

This paper presents a new approach to recognize elements in floor plan layouts. Besides walls and rooms, we aim to recognize diverse floor plan elements, such as doors, windows and different types of rooms, in the floor layouts. To this end, we model a hierarchy of floor plan elements and design a deep multi-task neural network with two tasks: one to learn to predict room-boundary elements, and the other to predict rooms with types. More importantly, we formulate the room-boundary-guided attention mechanism in our spatial contextual module to carefully take room-boundary features into account to enhance the room-type predictions. Furthermore, we design a cross-and-within-task weighted loss to balance the multi-label tasks and prepare two new datasets for floor plan recognition. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our network over the state-of-the-art methods.

We present KNOW--the Knowledge Navigator Ontology for the World--the first ontology designed to capture everyday knowledge to augment large language models (LLMs) in real-world generative AI use cases such as personal AI assistants. Our domain is human life, both its everyday concerns and its major milestones. We have limited the initial scope of the modeled concepts to only established human universals: spacetime (places, events) plus social (people, groups, organizations). The inclusion criteria for modeled concepts are pragmatic, beginning with universality and utility. We compare and contrast previous work such as Schema.org and Cyc--as well as attempts at a synthesis of knowledge graphs and language models--noting how LLMs already encode internally much of the commonsense tacit knowledge that took decades to capture in the Cyc project. We also make available code-generated software libraries for the 12 most popular programming languages, enabling the direct use of ontology concepts in software engineering. We emphasize simplicity and developer experience in promoting AI interoperability.

Large language model (LLM) based knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict the missing triples in the KGs with LLMs and enrich the KGs to become better web infrastructure, which can benefit a lot of web-based automatic services. However, research about LLM-based KGC is limited and lacks effective utilization of LLM's inference capabilities, which ignores the important structural information in KGs and prevents LLMs from acquiring accurate factual knowledge. In this paper, we discuss how to incorporate the helpful KG structural information into the LLMs, aiming to achieve structrual-aware reasoning in the LLMs. We first transfer the existing LLM paradigms to structural-aware settings and further propose a knowledge prefix adapter (KoPA) to fulfill this stated goal. KoPA employs structural embedding pre-training to capture the structural information of entities and relations in the KG. Then KoPA informs the LLMs of the knowledge prefix adapter which projects the structural embeddings into the textual space and obtains virtual knowledge tokens as a prefix of the input prompt. We conduct comprehensive experiments on these structural-aware LLM-based KGC methods and provide an in-depth analysis comparing how the introduction of structural information would be better for LLM's knowledge reasoning ability. Our code is released at https://github.com/zjukg/KoPA.

Text-driven 3D indoor scene generation could be useful for gaming, film industry, and AR/VR applications. However, existing methods cannot faithfully capture the room layout, nor do they allow flexible editing of individual objects in the room. To address these problems, we present Ctrl-Room, which is able to generate convincing 3D rooms with designer-style layouts and high-fidelity textures from just a text prompt. Moreover, Ctrl-Room enables versatile interactive editing operations such as resizing or moving individual furniture items. Our key insight is to separate the modeling of layouts and appearance. %how to model the room that takes into account both scene texture and geometry at the same time. To this end, Our proposed method consists of two stages, a `Layout Generation Stage' and an `Appearance Generation Stage'. The `Layout Generation Stage' trains a text-conditional diffusion model to learn the layout distribution with our holistic scene code parameterization. Next, the `Appearance Generation Stage' employs a fine-tuned ControlNet to produce a vivid panoramic image of the room guided by the 3D scene layout and text prompt. In this way, we achieve a high-quality 3D room with convincing layouts and lively textures. Benefiting from the scene code parameterization, we can easily edit the generated room model through our mask-guided editing module, without expensive editing-specific training. Extensive experiments on the Structured3D dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in producing more reasonable, view-consistent, and editable 3D rooms from natural language prompts.

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are trained on vast unlabeled data, rich in world knowledge. This fact has sparked the interest of the community in quantifying the amount of factual knowledge present in PLMs, as this explains their performance on downstream tasks, and potentially justifies their use as knowledge bases. In this work, we survey methods and datasets that are used to probe PLMs for factual knowledge. Our contributions are: (1) We propose a categorization scheme for factual probing methods that is based on how their inputs, outputs and the probed PLMs are adapted; (2) We provide an overview of the datasets used for factual probing; (3) We synthesize insights about knowledge retention and prompt optimization in PLMs, analyze obstacles to adopting PLMs as knowledge bases and outline directions for future work.

We introduce the task of predicting functional 3D scene graphs for real-world indoor environments from posed RGB-D images. Unlike traditional 3D scene graphs that focus on spatial relationships of objects, functional 3D scene graphs capture objects, interactive elements, and their functional relationships. Due to the lack of training data, we leverage foundation models, including visual language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs), to encode functional knowledge. We evaluate our approach on an extended SceneFun3D dataset and a newly collected dataset, FunGraph3D, both annotated with functional 3D scene graphs. Our method significantly outperforms adapted baselines, including Open3DSG and ConceptGraph, demonstrating its effectiveness in modeling complex scene functionalities. We also demonstrate downstream applications such as 3D question answering and robotic manipulation using functional 3D scene graphs. See our project page at https://openfungraph.github.io

Incorporating visual knowledge into text-only dialogue systems has become a potential direction to imitate the way humans think, imagine, and communicate. However, existing multimodal dialogue systems are either confined by the scale and quality of available datasets or the coarse concept of visual knowledge. To address these issues, we provide a new paradigm of constructing multimodal dialogues as well as two datasets extended from text-only dialogues under such paradigm (ReSee-WoW, ReSee-DD). We propose to explicitly split the visual knowledge into finer granularity (``turn-level'' and ``entity-level''). To further boost the accuracy and diversity of augmented visual information, we retrieve them from the Internet or a large image dataset. To demonstrate the superiority and universality of the provided visual knowledge, we propose a simple but effective framework ReSee to add visual representation into vanilla dialogue models by modality concatenations. We also conduct extensive experiments and ablations w.r.t. different model configurations and visual knowledge settings. Empirical, encouraging results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing visual knowledge at both entity and turn level but also verify the proposed model ReSee outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on automatic and human evaluations. By leveraging text and vision knowledge, ReSee can produce informative responses with real-world visual concepts. Our code is available at https://github.com/ImKeTT/ReSee.

Unlocking spatial reasoning in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) is crucial for enabling intelligent interaction with 3D environments. While prior efforts often rely on explicit 3D inputs or specialized model architectures, we ask: can LMMs reason about 3D space using only structured 2D representations derived from perception? We introduce Struct2D, a perception-guided prompting framework that combines bird's-eye-view (BEV) images with object marks and object-centric metadata, optionally incorporating egocentric keyframes when needed. Using Struct2D, we conduct an in-depth zero-shot analysis of closed-source LMMs (e.g., GPT-o3) and find that they exhibit surprisingly strong spatial reasoning abilities when provided with structured 2D inputs, effectively handling tasks such as relative direction estimation and route planning. Building on these insights, we construct Struct2D-Set, a large-scale instruction tuning dataset with 200K fine-grained QA pairs across eight spatial reasoning categories, generated automatically from 3D indoor scenes. We fine-tune an open-source LMM (Qwen2.5VL) on Struct2D-Set, achieving competitive performance on multiple benchmarks, including 3D question answering, dense captioning, and object grounding. Our approach demonstrates that structured 2D inputs can effectively bridge perception and language reasoning in LMMs-without requiring explicit 3D representations as input. We will release both our code and dataset to support future research.

Procedural text describes dynamic state changes during a step-by-step natural process (e.g., photosynthesis). In this work, we focus on the task of procedural text understanding, which aims to comprehend such documents and track entities' states and locations during a process. Although recent approaches have achieved substantial progress, their results are far behind human performance. Two challenges, the difficulty of commonsense reasoning and data insufficiency, still remain unsolved, which require the incorporation of external knowledge bases. Previous works on external knowledge injection usually rely on noisy web mining tools and heuristic rules with limited applicable scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel KnOwledge-Aware proceduraL text understAnding (KOALA) model, which effectively leverages multiple forms of external knowledge in this task. Specifically, we retrieve informative knowledge triples from ConceptNet and perform knowledge-aware reasoning while tracking the entities. Besides, we employ a multi-stage training schema which fine-tunes the BERT model over unlabeled data collected from Wikipedia before further fine-tuning it on the final model. Experimental results on two procedural text datasets, ProPara and Recipes, verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods, in which our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in comparison to various baselines.

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

Instruction following is a key capability for LLMs. However, recent studies have shown that LLMs often struggle with instructions containing multiple constraints (e.g. a request to create a social media post "in a funny tone" with "no hashtag"). Despite this, most evaluations focus solely on synthetic data. To address this, we introduce RealInstruct, the first benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow real-world multi-constrained instructions by leveraging queries real users asked AI assistants. We also investigate model-based evaluation as a cost-effective alternative to human annotation for this task. Our findings reveal that even the proprietary GPT-4 model fails to meet at least one constraint on over 21% of instructions, highlighting the limitations of state-of-the-art models. To address the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models, we propose the Decompose, Critique and Refine (DeCRIM) self-correction pipeline, which enhances LLMs' ability to follow constraints. DeCRIM works by decomposing the original instruction into a list of constraints and using a Critic model to decide when and where the LLM's response needs refinement. Our results show that DeCRIM improves Mistral's performance by 7.3% on RealInstruct and 8.0% on IFEval even with weak feedback. Moreover, we demonstrate that with strong feedback, open-source LLMs with DeCRIM can outperform GPT-4 on both benchmarks.

For an artist or a graphic designer, the spatial layout of a scene is a critical design choice. However, existing text-to-image diffusion models provide limited support for incorporating spatial information. This paper introduces Composite Diffusion as a means for artists to generate high-quality images by composing from the sub-scenes. The artists can specify the arrangement of these sub-scenes through a flexible free-form segment layout. They can describe the content of each sub-scene primarily using natural text and additionally by utilizing reference images or control inputs such as line art, scribbles, human pose, canny edges, and more. We provide a comprehensive and modular method for Composite Diffusion that enables alternative ways of generating, composing, and harmonizing sub-scenes. Further, we wish to evaluate the composite image for effectiveness in both image quality and achieving the artist's intent. We argue that existing image quality metrics lack a holistic evaluation of image composites. To address this, we propose novel quality criteria especially relevant to composite generation. We believe that our approach provides an intuitive method of art creation. Through extensive user surveys, quantitative and qualitative analysis, we show how it achieves greater spatial, semantic, and creative control over image generation. In addition, our methods do not need to retrain or modify the architecture of the base diffusion models and can work in a plug-and-play manner with the fine-tuned models.

How can a robot efficiently extract a desired object from a shelf when it is fully occluded by other objects? Prior works propose geometric approaches for this problem but do not consider object semantics. Shelves in pharmacies, restaurant kitchens, and grocery stores are often organized such that semantically similar objects are placed close to one another. Can large language models (LLMs) serve as semantic knowledge sources to accelerate robotic mechanical search in semantically arranged environments? With Semantic Spatial Search on Shelves (S^4), we use LLMs to generate affinity matrices, where entries correspond to semantic likelihood of physical proximity between objects. We derive semantic spatial distributions by synthesizing semantics with learned geometric constraints. S^4 incorporates Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and semantic refinement with predictions from ViLD, an open-vocabulary object detection model. Simulation experiments suggest that semantic spatial search reduces the search time relative to pure spatial search by an average of 24% across three domains: pharmacy, kitchen, and office shelves. A manually collected dataset of 100 semantic scenes suggests that OCR and semantic refinement improve object detection accuracy by 35%. Lastly, physical experiments in a pharmacy shelf suggest 47.1% improvement over pure spatial search. Supplementary material can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/s4-rss/home.

We propose an approach for estimating the latent knowledge embedded inside large language models (LLMs). We leverage the in-context learning (ICL) abilities of LLMs to estimate the extent to which an LLM knows the facts stored in a knowledge base. Our knowledge estimator avoids reliability concerns with previous prompting-based methods, is both conceptually simpler and easier to apply, and we demonstrate that it can surface more of the latent knowledge embedded in LLMs. We also investigate how different design choices affect the performance of ICL-based knowledge estimation. Using the proposed estimator, we perform a large-scale evaluation of the factual knowledge of a variety of open source LLMs, like OPT, Pythia, Llama(2), Mistral, Gemma, etc. over a large set of relations and facts from the Wikidata knowledge base. We observe differences in the factual knowledge between different model families and models of different sizes, that some relations are consistently better known than others but that models differ in the precise facts they know, and differences in the knowledge of base models and their finetuned counterparts.

Graphics design is important for various applications, including movie production and game design. To create a high-quality scene, designers usually need to spend hours in software like Blender, in which they might need to interleave and repeat operations, such as connecting material nodes, hundreds of times. Moreover, slightly different design goals may require completely different sequences, making automation difficult. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like GPT-4V, to intelligently search the design action space to arrive at an answer that can satisfy a user's intent. Specifically, we design a vision-based edit generator and state evaluator to work together to find the correct sequence of actions to achieve the goal. Inspired by the role of visual imagination in the human design process, we supplement the visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs with "imagined" reference images from image-generation models, providing visual grounding of abstract language descriptions. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence suggesting our system can produce simple but tedious Blender editing sequences for tasks such as editing procedural materials from text and/or reference images, as well as adjusting lighting configurations for product renderings in complex scenes.

Transformers have achieved great success in numerous NLP tasks but continue to exhibit notable gaps in multi-step factual reasoning, especially when real-world knowledge is sparse. Recent advances in grokking have demonstrated that neural networks can transition from memorizing to perfectly generalizing once they detect underlying logical patterns - yet these studies have primarily used small, synthetic tasks. In this paper, for the first time, we extend grokking to real-world factual data and address the challenge of dataset sparsity by augmenting existing knowledge graphs with carefully designed synthetic data to raise the ratio phi_r of inferred facts to atomic facts above the threshold required for grokking. Surprisingly, we find that even factually incorrect synthetic data can strengthen emergent reasoning circuits rather than degrade accuracy, as it forces the model to rely on relational structure rather than memorization. When evaluated on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, our approach achieves up to 95-100% accuracy on 2WikiMultiHopQA - substantially improving over strong baselines and matching or exceeding current state-of-the-art results. We further provide an in-depth analysis of how increasing phi_r drives the formation of generalizing circuits inside Transformers. Our findings suggest that grokking-based data augmentation can unlock implicit multi-hop reasoning capabilities, opening the door to more robust and interpretable factual reasoning in large-scale language models.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) involves answering questions that require external knowledge not present in the image. Existing methods first retrieve knowledge from external resources, then reason over the selected knowledge, the input image, and question for answer prediction. However, this two-step approach could lead to mismatches that potentially limit the VQA performance. For example, the retrieved knowledge might be noisy and irrelevant to the question, and the re-embedded knowledge features during reasoning might deviate from their original meanings in the knowledge base (KB). To address this challenge, we propose PICa, a simple yet effective method that Prompts GPT3 via the use of Image Captions, for knowledge-based VQA. Inspired by GPT-3's power in knowledge retrieval and question answering, instead of using structured KBs as in previous work, we treat GPT-3 as an implicit and unstructured KB that can jointly acquire and process relevant knowledge. Specifically, we first convert the image into captions (or tags) that GPT-3 can understand, then adapt GPT-3 to solve the VQA task in a few-shot manner by just providing a few in-context VQA examples. We further boost performance by carefully investigating: (i) what text formats best describe the image content, and (ii) how in-context examples can be better selected and used. PICa unlocks the first use of GPT-3 for multimodal tasks. By using only 16 examples, PICa surpasses the supervised state of the art by an absolute +8.6 points on the OK-VQA dataset. We also benchmark PICa on VQAv2, where PICa also shows a decent few-shot performance.

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

We automate deep step-by step reasoning in an LLM dialog thread by recursively exploring alternatives (OR-nodes) and expanding details (AND-nodes) up to a given depth. Starting from a single succinct task-specific initiator we steer the automated dialog thread to stay focussed on the task by synthesizing a prompt that summarizes the depth-first steps taken so far. Our algorithm is derived from a simple recursive descent implementation of a Horn Clause interpreter, except that we accommodate our logic engine to fit the natural language reasoning patterns LLMs have been trained on. Semantic similarity to ground-truth facts or oracle advice from another LLM instance is used to restrict the search space and validate the traces of justification steps returned as answers. At the end, the unique minimal model of a generated Horn Clause program collects the results of the reasoning process. As applications, we sketch implementations of consequence predictions, causal explanations, recommendation systems and topic-focussed exploration of scientific literature.

Spatial reasoning plays a vital role in both human cognition and machine intelligence, prompting new research into language models' (LMs) capabilities in this regard. However, existing benchmarks reveal shortcomings in evaluating qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR). These benchmarks typically present oversimplified scenarios or unclear natural language descriptions, hindering effective evaluation. We present a novel benchmark for assessing QSR in LMs, which is grounded in realistic 3D simulation data, offering a series of diverse room layouts with various objects and their spatial relationships. This approach provides a more detailed and context-rich narrative for spatial reasoning evaluation, diverging from traditional, toy-task-oriented scenarios. Our benchmark encompasses a broad spectrum of qualitative spatial relationships, including topological, directional, and distance relations. These are presented with different viewing points, varied granularities, and density of relation constraints to mimic real-world complexities. A key contribution is our logic-based consistency-checking tool, which enables the assessment of multiple plausible solutions, aligning with real-world scenarios where spatial relationships are often open to interpretation. Our benchmark evaluation of advanced LMs reveals their strengths and limitations in spatial reasoning. They face difficulties with multi-hop spatial reasoning and interpreting a mix of different view descriptions, pointing to areas for future improvement.

This paper proposes LayoutLLM, a more flexible document analysis method for understanding imaged documents. Visually Rich Document Understanding tasks, such as document image classification and information extraction, have gained significant attention due to their importance. Existing methods have been developed to enhance document comprehension by incorporating pre-training awareness of images, text, and layout structure. However, these methods require fine-tuning for each task and dataset, and the models are expensive to train and operate. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new LayoutLLM that integrates these with large-scale language models (LLMs). By leveraging the strengths of existing research in document image understanding and LLMs' superior language understanding capabilities, the proposed model, fine-tuned with multimodal instruction datasets, performs an understanding of document images in a single model. Our experiments demonstrate improvement over the baseline model in various document analysis tasks.

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

Visual navigation is an essential skill for home-assistance robots, providing the object-searching ability to accomplish long-horizon daily tasks. Many recent approaches use Large Language Models (LLMs) for commonsense inference to improve exploration efficiency. However, the planning process of LLMs is limited within texts and it is difficult to represent the spatial occupancy and geometry layout only by texts. Both are important for making rational navigation decisions. In this work, we seek to unleash the spatial perception and planning ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and explore whether the VLM, with only on-board camera captured RGB/RGB-D stream inputs, can efficiently finish the visual navigation tasks in a mapless manner. We achieve this by developing the imagination-powered navigation framework ImagineNav, which imagines the future observation images at valuable robot views and translates the complex navigation planning process into a rather simple best-view image selection problem for VLM. To generate appropriate candidate robot views for imagination, we introduce the Where2Imagine module, which is distilled to align with human navigation habits. Finally, to reach the VLM preferred views, an off-the-shelf point-goal navigation policy is utilized. Empirical experiments on the challenging open-vocabulary object navigation benchmarks demonstrates the superiority of our proposed system.

Although great progress has been made in 3D visual grounding, current models still rely on explicit textual descriptions for grounding and lack the ability to reason human intentions from implicit instructions. We propose a new task called 3D reasoning grounding and introduce a new benchmark ScanReason which provides over 10K question-answer-location pairs from five reasoning types that require the synerization of reasoning and grounding. We further design our approach, ReGround3D, composed of the visual-centric reasoning module empowered by Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) and the 3D grounding module to obtain accurate object locations by looking back to the enhanced geometry and fine-grained details from the 3D scenes. A chain-of-grounding mechanism is proposed to further boost the performance with interleaved reasoning and grounding steps during inference. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmark validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

This paper revisits visual representation in knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) and demonstrates that using regional information in a better way can significantly improve the performance. While visual representation is extensively studied in traditional VQA, it is under-explored in knowledge-based VQA even though these two tasks share the common spirit, i.e., rely on visual input to answer the question. Specifically, we observe that in most state-of-the-art knowledge-based VQA methods: 1) visual features are extracted either from the whole image or in a sliding window manner for retrieving knowledge, and the important relationship within/among object regions is neglected; 2) visual features are not well utilized in the final answering model, which is counter-intuitive to some extent. Based on these observations, we propose a new knowledge-based VQA method REVIVE, which tries to utilize the explicit information of object regions not only in the knowledge retrieval stage but also in the answering model. The key motivation is that object regions and inherent relationship are important for knowledge-based VQA. We perform extensive experiments on the standard OK-VQA dataset and achieve new state-of-the-art performance, i.e., 58.0% accuracy, surpassing previous state-of-the-art method by a large margin (+3.6%). We also conduct detailed analysis and show the necessity of regional information in different framework components for knowledge-based VQA. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/yzleroy/REVIVE.

Previous literature has proved that Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) can store factual knowledge. However, we find that facts stored in the PLMs are not always correct. It motivates us to explore a fundamental question: How do we calibrate factual knowledge in PLMs without re-training from scratch? In this work, we propose a simple and lightweight method CaliNet to achieve this goal. To be specific, we first detect whether PLMs can learn the right facts via a contrastive score between right and fake facts. If not, we then use a lightweight method to add and adapt new parameters to specific factual texts. Experiments on the knowledge probing task show the calibration effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, through closed-book question answering, we find that the calibrated PLM possesses knowledge generalization ability after fine-tuning. Beyond the calibration performance, we further investigate and visualize the knowledge calibration mechanism.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities in complex tasks. However, they lack up-to-date knowledge and experience hallucinations during reasoning, which can lead to incorrect reasoning processes and diminish their performance and trustworthiness. Knowledge graphs (KGs), which capture vast amounts of facts in a structured format, offer a reliable source of knowledge for reasoning. Nevertheless, existing KG-based LLM reasoning methods only treat KGs as factual knowledge bases and overlook the importance of their structural information for reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel method called reasoning on graphs (RoG) that synergizes LLMs with KGs to enable faithful and interpretable reasoning. Specifically, we present a planning-retrieval-reasoning framework, where RoG first generates relation paths grounded by KGs as faithful plans. These plans are then used to retrieve valid reasoning paths from the KGs for LLMs to conduct faithful reasoning. Furthermore, RoG not only distills knowledge from KGs to improve the reasoning ability of LLMs through training but also allows seamless integration with any arbitrary LLMs during inference. Extensive experiments on two benchmark KGQA datasets demonstrate that RoG achieves state-of-the-art performance on KG reasoning tasks and generates faithful and interpretable reasoning results.

Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks. Despite the models only seeing text in training, several recent studies suggest that LLM representations implicitly capture aspects of the underlying grounded concepts. Here, we explore LLM representations of a particularly salient kind of grounded knowledge -- spatial relationships. We design natural-language navigation tasks and evaluate the ability of LLMs, in particular GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, and Llama2 series models, to represent and reason about spatial structures. These tasks reveal substantial variability in LLM performance across different spatial structures, including square, hexagonal, and triangular grids, rings, and trees. In extensive error analysis, we find that LLMs' mistakes reflect both spatial and non-spatial factors. These findings suggest that LLMs appear to capture certain aspects of spatial structure implicitly, but room for improvement remains.

Embodied agents have achieved prominent performance in following human instructions to complete tasks. However, the potential of providing instructions informed by texts and images to assist humans in completing tasks remains underexplored. To uncover this capability, we present the multimodal procedural planning (MPP) task, in which models are given a high-level goal and generate plans of paired text-image steps, providing more complementary and informative guidance than unimodal plans. The key challenges of MPP are to ensure the informativeness, temporal coherence,and accuracy of plans across modalities. To tackle this, we propose Text-Image Prompting (TIP), a dual-modality prompting method that jointly leverages zero-shot reasoning ability in large language models (LLMs) and compelling text-to-image generation ability from diffusion-based models. TIP improves the interaction in the dual modalities using Text-to-Image Bridge and Image-to-Text Bridge, allowing LLMs to guide the textual-grounded image plan generation and leveraging the descriptions of image plans to ground the textual plan reversely. To address the lack of relevant datasets, we collect WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN as a testbed for MPP. Our results show compelling human preferences and automatic scores against unimodal and multimodal baselines on WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN in terms of informativeness, temporal coherence, and plan accuracy. Our code and data: https://github.com/YujieLu10/MPP.

Despite significant advancements in text-to-image models for generating high-quality images, these methods still struggle to ensure the controllability of text prompts over images in the context of complex text prompts, especially when it comes to retaining object attributes and relationships. In this paper, we propose CompAgent, a training-free approach for compositional text-to-image generation, with a large language model (LLM) agent as its core. The fundamental idea underlying CompAgent is premised on a divide-and-conquer methodology. Given a complex text prompt containing multiple concepts including objects, attributes, and relationships, the LLM agent initially decomposes it, which entails the extraction of individual objects, their associated attributes, and the prediction of a coherent scene layout. These individual objects can then be independently conquered. Subsequently, the agent performs reasoning by analyzing the text, plans and employs the tools to compose these isolated objects. The verification and human feedback mechanism is finally incorporated into our agent to further correct the potential attribute errors and refine the generated images. Guided by the LLM agent, we propose a tuning-free multi-concept customization model and a layout-to-image generation model as the tools for concept composition, and a local image editing method as the tool to interact with the agent for verification. The scene layout controls the image generation process among these tools to prevent confusion among multiple objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach for compositional text-to-image generation: CompAgent achieves more than 10\% improvement on T2I-CompBench, a comprehensive benchmark for open-world compositional T2I generation. The extension to various related tasks also illustrates the flexibility of our CompAgent for potential applications.

We present GeoSynth, a model for synthesizing satellite images with global style and image-driven layout control. The global style control is via textual prompts or geographic location. These enable the specification of scene semantics or regional appearance respectively, and can be used together. We train our model on a large dataset of paired satellite imagery, with automatically generated captions, and OpenStreetMap data. We evaluate various combinations of control inputs, including different types of layout controls. Results demonstrate that our model can generate diverse, high-quality images and exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/mvrl/GeoSynth.

Despite advances in indoor 3D scene layout generation, synthesizing scenes with dense object arrangements remains challenging. Existing methods primarily focus on large furniture while neglecting smaller objects, resulting in unrealistically empty scenes. Those that place small objects typically do not honor arrangement specifications, resulting in largely random placement not following the text description. We present HSM, a hierarchical framework for indoor scene generation with dense object arrangements across spatial scales. Indoor scenes are inherently hierarchical, with surfaces supporting objects at different scales, from large furniture on floors to smaller objects on tables and shelves. HSM embraces this hierarchy and exploits recurring cross-scale spatial patterns to generate complex and realistic indoor scenes in a unified manner. Our experiments show that HSM outperforms existing methods by generating scenes that are more realistic and better conform to user input across room types and spatial configurations.