Current AI agents compellingly describe slides. However, AI-assisted slide editing requires more than understanding: the output must retain layout, style, component structure, and native editability. Towards, AI-assisted slide editing, existing agents operate on screenshots or weak document representations and often fragment coherent visual units, rasterize editable content, or break layout. In contrast, for controllable slide editing, we introduce an agentic framework, SLIDEFORGE, which builds a Deck State Graph, an executable slide state that links visual decomposition, native pptx object structure, and perceptual organization. By recovering human-referable components while retaining fine-grained editable structure, SLIDEFORGE supports theme-preserving reconstruction through slide-native operations and rendered-state verification. We further introduce an evaluation paradigm for controllable slide transformation that jointly measures component recovery, preservation, restyling consistency, visual quality, and native editability. Experiments show that SLIDEFORGE outperforms direct prompting, screenshot-based agents, and generic code-agent baselines across these dimensions. Code is available at https://github.com/UIUC-MONET/SLIDEFORGE.
Jiheon Kim, Kyudan Jung, Jaegul Choocs.CL cs.AI cs.HC
Automating slide editing requires simultaneously satisfying modification accuracy, preservation fidelity, and robustness to deck length. Existing LLM-based systems often fail on real-world presentation files because they rely on idealized intermediate representations or open-ended code generation, which are prone to cascading errors in long decks. We introduce EditPPT, a multi-agent framework that reformulates slide editing as a constrained tool-selection problem. By executing localized shape-level operations through the native PowerPoint COM interface, EditPPT narrows the LLM action space while preserving the application-resolved structure of user-authored decks. By separating validation across modalities, our dual-modal validation provides more robust assessment of both instruction fidelity and visual quality. We also present DeckEdit-Bench, a benchmark with 28 human-authored decks, 582 slides, and 183 editing prompts across short, medium, and long deck tiers. Experiments show that EditPPT achieves a 99.5% execution rate, 88.7% slide-targeting F1, 82.5% instruction following, and 91.5% object preservation overall, while maintaining strong performance on long decks. Our code and benchmark are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EditPPT-0E27/