Crafter: A Multi-Agent Harness for Editable Scientific Figure Generation from Diverse Inputs
This work provides a solution for researchers to more efficiently produce editable, high-quality scientific figures, addressing the limitations of existing systems that are restricted to single figure types and text-only inputs.
This paper addresses the labor-intensive process of creating scientific figures by introducing Crafter, a multi-agent system that generates publication-quality illustrations from diverse inputs across various figure types and conditions. It significantly outperforms existing standalone generators and agentic baselines on PaperBanana-Bench and CraftBench, and its companion system, CraftEditor, converts raster outputs into editable SVGs, surpassing all baselines in faithfulness.
Scientific figures are among the most effective means of communicating complex research ideas, yet producing publication-quality illustrations remains one of the most labor-intensive parts of paper preparation. Existing automated systems each target a single figure type under text-only input, leaving the diversity of types and conditions researchers actually use unaddressed; their raster outputs further cannot be locally revised. Because scientific figures are structured compositions of discrete semantic components, the localized errors generators produce on such layouts demand not a stronger backbone but a harness. We instantiate this harness in two complementary systems: Crafter, a multi-agent harness for figure generation that generalizes across figure types and input conditions without architectural changes, and CraftEditor, which applies the same pattern to convert raster outputs into editable SVGs. Moreover, we introduce CraftBench, a benchmark spanning three figure types and four input conditions with human quality annotation. Experiments show that Crafter substantially outperforms both standalone generators and the agentic baseline on PaperBanana-Bench and CraftBench, with ablations confirming each component's independent contribution; CraftEditor faithfully converts outputs into editable SVGs that surpass all baselines. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/HaozheZhao/Crafter.