Shizhao Sun

Arctanx An, Shizhao Sun, Danqing Huang et al.

Assessing the aesthetic quality of graphic design is central to visual communication, yet remains underexplored in vision language models (VLMs). We investigate whether VLMs can evaluate design aesthetics in ways comparable to humans. Prior work faces three key limitations: benchmarks restricted to narrow principles and coarse evaluation protocols, a lack of systematic VLM comparisons, and limited training data for model improvement. In this work, we introduce AesEval-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning four dimensions, twelve indicators, and three fully quantifiable tasks: aesthetic judgment, region selection, and precise localization. Then, we systematically evaluate proprietary, open-source, and reasoning-augmented VLMs, revealing clear performance gaps against the nuanced demands of aesthetic assessment. Moreover, we construct a training dataset to fine-tune VLMs for this domain, leveraging human-guided VLM labeling to produce task labels at scale and indicator-grounded reasoning to tie abstract indicators to concrete design regions.Together, our work establishes the first systematic framework for aesthetic quality assessment in graphic design. Our code and dataset will be released at: \href{https://github.com/arctanxarc/AesEval-Bench}{https://github.com/arctanxarc/AesEval-Bench}

Yang Zhao, Shizhao Sun, Meisheng Zhang et al.

Current one-pass 3D scene synthesis methods often suffer from spatial hallucinations, such as collisions, due to a lack of deliberative reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce SceneReVis, a vision-grounded self-reflection framework that employs an iterative ``diagnose-and-act'' loop to explicitly intercept and resolve spatial conflicts using multi-modal feedback. To support this step-wise paradigm, we construct SceneChain-12k, a large-scale dataset of causal construction trajectories derived through a novel reverse engineering pipeline. We further propose a two-stage training recipe that transitions from Supervised Fine-Tuning to Agentic Reinforcement Learning, evolving the model into an active spatial planner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SceneReVis achieves state-of-the-art performance in high-fidelity generation and goal-oriented optimization, with robust generalization to long-tail domains.

Ziyuan Liu, Shizhao Sun, Danqing Huang et al.

Graphic design generation demands a delicate balance between high visual fidelity and fine-grained structural editability. However, existing approaches typically bifurcate into either non-editable raster image synthesis or abstract layout generation devoid of visual content. Recent combinations of these two approaches attempt to bridge this gap but often suffer from rigid composition schemas and unresolvable visual dissonances (e.g., text-background conflicts) due to their inexpressive representation and open-loop nature. To address these challenges, we propose DesignAsCode, a novel framework that reimagines graphic design as a programmatic synthesis task using HTML/CSS. Specifically, we introduce a Plan-Implement-Reflect pipeline, incorporating a Semantic Planner to construct dynamic, variable-depth element hierarchies and a Visual-Aware Reflection mechanism that iteratively optimizes the code to rectify rendering artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DesignAsCode significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both structural validity and aesthetic quality. Furthermore, our code-native representation unlocks advanced capabilities, including automatic layout retargeting, complex document generation (e.g., resumes), and CSS-based animation. Our project page is available at https://liuziyuan1109.github.io/design-as-code/.

Jiawei Lin, Shizhao Sun, Danqing Huang et al.

Automated redesign without manual adjustments marks a key step forward in the design workflow. In this work, we focus on a foundational redesign task termed design layout editing, which seeks to autonomously modify the geometric composition of a design based on user intents. To overcome the ambiguity of user needs expressed in natural language, we introduce four basic and important editing actions and standardize the format of editing operations. The underexplored task presents a unique challenge: satisfying specified editing operations while simultaneously preserving the layout structure of unedited elements. Besides, the scarcity of triplet (original design, editing operation, edited design) samples poses another formidable challenge. To this end, we present ReLayout, a novel framework for versatile and structure-preserving design layout editing that operates without triplet data. Specifically, ReLayout first introduces the relation graph, which contains the position and size relationships among unedited elements, as the constraint for layout structure preservation. Then, relation-aware design reconstruction (RADR) is proposed to bypass the data challenge. By learning to reconstruct a design from its elements, a relation graph, and a synthesized editing operation, RADR effectively emulates the editing process in a self-supervised manner. A multi-modal large language model serves as the backbone for RADR, unifying multiple editing actions within a single model and thus achieving versatile editing after fine-tuning. Qualitative, quantitative results and user studies show that ReLayout significantly outperforms the baseline models in terms of editing quality, accuracy, and layout structure preservation.