WebVIA: A Web-based Vision-Language Agentic Framework for Interactive and Verifiable UI-to-Code Generation
This addresses the labor-intensive process of UI development for developers by providing a more automated and interactive solution, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing vision-language models.
The paper tackles the problem of automating UI-to-code generation by introducing WebVIA, an agentic framework that generates interactive and verifiable code from UI mockups, achieving substantial improvements in accuracy and stability over existing methods.
User interface (UI) development requires translating design mockups into functional code, a process that remains repetitive and labor-intensive. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) automate UI-to-Code generation, they generate only static HTML/CSS/JavaScript layouts lacking interactivity. To address this, we propose WebVIA, the first agentic framework for interactive UI-to-Code generation and validation. The framework comprises three components: 1) an exploration agent to capture multi-state UI screenshots; 2) a UI2Code model that generates executable interactive code; 3) a validation module that verifies the interactivity. Experiments demonstrate that WebVIA-Agent achieves more stable and accurate UI exploration than general-purpose agents (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro). In addition, our fine-tuned WebVIA-UI2Code models exhibit substantial improvements in generating executable and interactive HTML/CSS/JavaScript code, outperforming their base counterparts across both interactive and static UI2Code benchmarks. Our code and models are available at \href{https://zheny2751-dotcom.github.io/webvia.github.io/}{\texttt{https://webvia.github.io}}.