Shishi Xiao, Adam J. Coscia, David H. Laidlawcs.CV cs.HC
Graphic designers often blend visual concepts to communicate multiple ideas within a single image, leveraging positive and negative space to create balance, emphasis, and aesthetic appeal. While computational methods have begun to support automatic concept blending, they largely overlook the role of spatial composition in the design. To address this gap, we present an automatic pipeline that explicitly applies positive and negative space throughout the blending process. Our approach first identifies plausible regions for concept integration by combining semantic reasoning from vision-language models with geometric constraints derived from real-world examples. Conditioned on these regions, the system generates blended compositions using a hybrid pixel-vector pipeline: diffusion-based inpainting produces a fast, coarse initialization, which is then refined through vector-based optimization at the point level to ensure structural coherence and balanced semantic expression. A multimodal agent orchestrates this process as a planner and evaluator, enabling iterative improvement and interpretable control. Through an evaluation using both baseline comparisons and a user study, we demonstrate greater expressiveness, creativity, and concept recognizability by effectively leveraging positive and negative space. We further demonstrate the generalizability of our approach across diverse applications, including controllable image and infographic generation.
Leonardo Zini, Elia Frigieri, Lorenzo Baraldics.CV cs.AI
Scalable Vector Graphics are a fundamental medium for resolution-independent visual content, yet the deep learning community lacks a continuous, dense, and invertible latent space for vector representations, the kind of foundational building block that Variational Autoencoders and their descendants have long provided for raster images. We introduce SLS (SVG Latent Space), a Transformer-based autoencoder that learns compact dense representations of individual SVG paths, the atomic visual elements from which any SVG image can be composed. By modeling SVG commands, coordinate data, and visual properties within a unified BPE-based token vocabulary, SLS learns fixed-size latent representations that jointly capture structure and appearance, and can be decoded back into valid, style-consistent SVG paths with high fidelity. The resulting embedding space is robust, invertible, and structured: embeddings lie on a unit hypersphere, enabling efficient similarity search, composition, and downstream conditioning through simple vector-space operations. Finally, we demonstrate that SLS generalizes across diverse tasks reducing their FLOPs by over 150 times compared to token-based approaches, and establishing a general-purpose latent foundation for vector graphics research.
Vector graphics are prized for their resolution independence, compact storage, and direct editability, making differentiable optimization of their parametric primitives an attractive goal. Yet classical rasterization is discontinuous with respect to geometry, and existing remedies that smooth the forward pass demand increasingly elaborate heuristics as scene complexity grows. We trace this fragility to a gradient seesaw: design choices that improve forward geometric exactness can systematically degrade the induced gradient signal, and vice versa. To navigate this tension we introduce CubicSplat, a differentiable vector rasterizer that replaces Bézier closest-point solvers with uniform polyline surrogates whose geometric error is bounded at $O(S^{-2})$. The resulting static computation graph yields well-conditioned gradients by construction, while a compositing-derived visibility mechanism prunes degenerate primitives without auxiliary regularization. On DIV2K and Kodak benchmarks CubicSplat achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality with over 2 dB PSNR gain in the closed-fill setting, while training up to 4x faster than prior methods. The code is available at https://github.com/CubicSplat/repo
Dazhi Zhong, Rowan Bradbury, Grant Daviscs.CV cs.LG
We invert the typical formulation of sketch generation: instead of drawing strokes in order, we predict a 2D field that defines the order in which strokes are drawn. We use a pretrained latent flow-matching transformer to supply the image prior to predict an intermediate representation, while training the VAE's decoder to predict the order field, stroke mask, and stroke segmentation. We vectorize the predicted segmentation into polylines and sort them by the field, producing an ordered vector sketch. Our model can predict an ordered vector sketch from a text description or derender an image into ordered vectors; for either, it follows text instructions specifying the order of drawing.
Graphical Abstracts (GAs) visually summarize the key findings of academic papers, playing a crucial role in facilitating the understanding of research content. Recently, advancements in vision-language models and image generation models have enabled the automatic generation of scientific figures based on paper content. However, most conventional methods output the generated results as raster graphics, making post-editing (e.g., text modification and layout changes) highly difficult. This poses a significant challenge, as they are unsuitable for the iterative figure revision process inherent in paper writing and peer review. To tackle these challenges, we define the novel task of generating editable GAs from paper content and propose GenGA, a new GA generation framework that directly produces figures in vector format. By generating figures as a collection of vector elements with a hierarchical structure, GenGA produces outputs that can be seamlessly imported into existing drawing tools for intuitive, element-level editing. Furthermore, we introduce the Structural Independence Coefficient (SIC), a metric that quantifies the editing simplicity of a figure based on the degree to which local modifications propagate to other elements. Experimental results show that GenGA achieves superior editing simplicity compared to conventional methods, and even surpasses human-authored GAs in conciseness and semantic alignment. We also validate SIC as an effective metric correlated with manual editing costs. This study fundamentally redefines GA generation as an editable vector graphic generation problem grounded in the practical workflows of researchers, significantly promoting effective scientific communication.
Differentiable rendering of planar rational splines remains largely underexplored, despite their widespread use in vector graphics and design. Existing differentiable vector renderers primarily focus on Bézier curves and rely on analytic rasterization, which can suffer from gradient instability and limited flexibility. We propose NURBS Splatting, a unified framework that represents planar rational curves as continuous Gaussian fields. By sampling Gaussians along the curve parameter domain and inside closed regions, rendering is reformulated as a smooth accumulation process with stable gradients. Our method naturally supports long splines, rational weights, non-uniform knots, and closed-region filling. We demonstrate its effectiveness in calligraphy reconstruction, vectorization frameworks, and long-spline image abstraction, showing improved stability and reconstruction quality over existing approaches.
Islamic geometric patterns are governed by exact rotational symmetry and strict construction rules. This paper treats these rules as formal geometric knowledge and embeds them in a neural completion framework, rather than leaving them to be learned statistically from data. Given sparse control geometry and a target symmetry order, the system completes the pattern as a vector graph by predicting edges and refinements of bounded curves over a candidate lattice whose edges are organised into rotational orbits under the cyclic group. Symmetry is enforced either by constraining predictions within these orbits or by projecting them onto them during inference. The orbit-tied variant provides a constructive guarantee: for any input and any orbit-level selection rule, it produces exact N-fold symmetry, preserves anchor points, and keeps all refinements within prescribed bounds. These properties are verified numerically. The study focuses on rotational symmetry, and all quantitative results are obtained from procedurally generated graphs inspired by Islamic geometric design rather than from a historical corpus. On clean inputs, enforcing exact validity produces no measurable loss in fidelity. When control geometry is missing, an unstructured decoder loses fidelity and breaks symmetry; retraining on corrupted inputs recovers much of the fidelity but not exact validity. Symmetry-structured inference, by contrast, keeps violations at zero throughout. The results show that augmentation and symmetry structure address distinct failure modes: augmentation improves fidelity under corruption, while symmetry structure guarantees validity. The framework therefore provides a knowledge-constrained, guarantee-backed approach to neural completion for scalable vector ornaments whose validity depends on exact geometric structure.
Variable fonts enable continuous variation of glyph geometry along semantic design axes such as weight, width, slant, and optical size. However, constructing a variable font from a static font remains a labor-intensive process requiring expert typographic design and manual specification of glyph variation data. We introduce NIV (Neural Axis Variations), a method that automatically converts a static font into a fully functional variable font. Given glyph outlines and a set of desired design axes, NIV predicts per-point displacements. The model operates directly on vector glyph geometry and employs a novel Property Embedding mechanism that captures interactions between multiple axes, enabling consistent multi-axis variation within a unified framework. We train NIV on a newly constructed dataset derived from variable Google Fonts, comprising over one million variation tuples. The resulting model generalizes across unseen code points, unseen font styles, high-complexity CJK glyphs, and even out-of-distribution handwriting inputs. The generated outputs are standard variable font files supporting continuous interpolation via existing rendering engines. To facilitate research, we release the dataset, the complete training and inference implementation, and trained models at https://github.com/ndvbd/NIV. Beyond typography, our approach demonstrates how structured geometric objects with continuous parametric variation can be synthesized using neural deformations.
Line drawings are a highly expressive art form that requires the artist to abstract and distill the essence of their subject. We present the first semantics-driven method for automatically generating single-line drawings in vector format, guided either by a text prompt describing the concept or an input image depicting it. Our approach leverages score distillation sampling to optimize the parameters of a uniform rational B-spline (URBS) curve, ensuring that the drawing consists of a single continuous stroke by design. This representation provides fine-grained control over the level of detail, while additional loss terms allow us to steer the final artistic style. We demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art text-to-image models and optimization pipelines for this task, producing results that are both more aesthetically pleasing and more faithful to the style of continuous line drawing artists. Furthermore, because our method generates a vectorized curve, it directly supports downstream fabrication processes such as embroidery, laser engraving and wire bending. Our code and results are available at https://github.com/tanguymagne/SLDgen.