CVLGDec 3, 2025

Step-by-step Layered Design Generation

arXiv:2512.03335v1h-index: 24
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

This addresses the incremental challenge of making design generation more realistic and complex for designers and AI practitioners.

The paper tackles the problem of design generation by proposing a step-by-step layered approach, where a model generates designs following a sequence of instructions, and demonstrates its efficacy through experimental analysis and a new benchmark.

Design generation, in its essence, is a step-by-step process where designers progressively refine and enhance their work through careful modifications. Despite this fundamental characteristic, existing approaches mainly treat design synthesis as a single-step generation problem, significantly underestimating the inherent complexity of the creative process. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel problem setting called Step-by-Step Layered Design Generation, which tasks a machine learning model with generating a design that adheres to a sequence of instructions from a designer. Leveraging recent advancements in multi-modal LLMs, we propose SLEDGE: Step-by-step LayEred Design GEnerator to model each update to a design as an atomic, layered change over its previous state, while being grounded in the instruction. To complement our new problem setting, we introduce a new evaluation suite, including a dataset and a benchmark. Our exhaustive experimental analysis and comparison with state-of-the-art approaches tailored to our new setup demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. We hope our work will attract attention to this pragmatic and under-explored research area.

Foundations

The foundational work for this paper's niche, ranked by how specifically the neighbourhood builds on it — not by global fame.

Your Notes