Daily Papers

The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has advanced numerous applications, yet efficient single-batch inference remains vital for on-device intelligence. While FPGAs offer fine-grained data control and high energy efficiency, recent GPU optimizations have narrowed their advantage, especially under arithmetic-based computation. To overcome this, we leverage FPGAs' abundant on-chip memory to shift LLM inference from arithmetic- to memory-based computation through table lookups. We present LUT-LLM, the first FPGA accelerator enabling 1B+ LLM inference via vector-quantized memory operations. Our analysis identifies activation-weight co-quantization as the most effective scheme, supported by (1) bandwidth-aware parallel centroid search, (2) efficient 2D table lookups, and (3) a spatial-temporal hybrid design minimizing data caching. Implemented on an AMD V80 FPGA for a customized Qwen 3 1.7B model, LUT-LLM achieves 1.66x lower latency than AMD MI210 and 1.72x higher energy efficiency than NVIDIA A100, scaling to 32B models with 2.16x efficiency gain over A100.

Bi-temporal change detection at scale based on Very High Resolution (VHR) images is crucial for Earth monitoring. This remains poorly addressed so far: methods either require large volumes of annotated data (semantic case), or are limited to restricted datasets (binary set-ups). Most approaches do not exhibit the versatility required for temporal and spatial adaptation: simplicity in architecture design and pretraining on realistic and comprehensive datasets. Synthetic datasets are the key solution but still fail to handle complex and diverse scenes. In this paper, we present HySCDG a generative pipeline for creating a large hybrid semantic change detection dataset that contains both real VHR images and inpainted ones, along with land cover semantic map at both dates and the change map. Being semantically and spatially guided, HySCDG generates realistic images, leading to a comprehensive and hybrid transfer-proof dataset FSC-180k. We evaluate FSC-180k on five change detection cases (binary and semantic), from zero-shot to mixed and sequential training, and also under low data regime training. Experiments demonstrate that pretraining on our hybrid dataset leads to a significant performance boost, outperforming SyntheWorld, a fully synthetic dataset, in every configuration. All codes, models, and data are available here: https://yb23.github.io/projects/cywd/

Humans perceive and understand real-world spaces through a stream of visual observations. Therefore, the ability to streamingly maintain and update spatial evidence from potentially unbounded video streams is essential for spatial intelligence. The core challenge is not simply longer context windows but how spatial information is selected, organized, and retained over time. In this paper, we propose Spatial-TTT towards streaming visual-based spatial intelligence with test-time training (TTT), which adapts a subset of parameters (fast weights) to capture and organize spatial evidence over long-horizon scene videos. Specifically, we design a hybrid architecture and adopt large-chunk updates parallel with sliding-window attention for efficient spatial video processing. To further promote spatial awareness, we introduce a spatial-predictive mechanism applied to TTT layers with 3D spatiotemporal convolution, which encourages the model to capture geometric correspondence and temporal continuity across frames. Beyond architecture design, we construct a dataset with dense 3D spatial descriptions, which guides the model to update its fast weights to memorize and organize global 3D spatial signals in a structured manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spatial-TTT improves long-horizon spatial understanding and achieves state-of-the-art performance on video spatial benchmarks. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Spatial-TTT.

Graphic design plays a vital role in visual communication across advertising, marketing, and multimedia entertainment. Prior work has explored automated graphic design generation using diffusion models, aiming to streamline creative workflows and democratize design capabilities. However, complex graphic design scenarios require accurately adhering to design intent specified by multiple heterogeneous user-provided elements (\eg images, layouts, and texts), which pose multi-condition control challenges for existing methods. Specifically, previous single-condition control models demonstrate effectiveness only within their specialized domains but fail to generalize to other conditions, while existing multi-condition methods often lack fine-grained control over each sub-condition and compromise overall compositional harmony. To address these limitations, we introduce CreatiDesign, a systematic solution for automated graphic design covering both model architecture and dataset construction. First, we design a unified multi-condition driven architecture that enables flexible and precise integration of heterogeneous design elements with minimal architectural modifications to the base diffusion model. Furthermore, to ensure that each condition precisely controls its designated image region and to avoid interference between conditions, we propose a multimodal attention mask mechanism. Additionally, we develop a fully automated pipeline for constructing graphic design datasets, and introduce a new dataset with 400K samples featuring multi-condition annotations, along with a comprehensive benchmark. Experimental results show that CreatiDesign outperforms existing models by a clear margin in faithfully adhering to user intent.

Layout design is an important task in various design fields, including user interface, document, and graphic design. As this task requires tedious manual effort by designers, prior works have attempted to automate this process using generative models, but commonly fell short of providing intuitive user controls and achieving design objectives. In this paper, we build a conditional latent diffusion model, PLay, that generates parametrically conditioned layouts in vector graphic space from user-specified guidelines, which are commonly used by designers for representing their design intents in current practices. Our method outperforms prior works across three datasets on metrics including FID and FD-VG, and in user study. Moreover, it brings a novel and interactive experience to professional layout design processes.

For an artist or a graphic designer, the spatial layout of a scene is a critical design choice. However, existing text-to-image diffusion models provide limited support for incorporating spatial information. This paper introduces Composite Diffusion as a means for artists to generate high-quality images by composing from the sub-scenes. The artists can specify the arrangement of these sub-scenes through a flexible free-form segment layout. They can describe the content of each sub-scene primarily using natural text and additionally by utilizing reference images or control inputs such as line art, scribbles, human pose, canny edges, and more. We provide a comprehensive and modular method for Composite Diffusion that enables alternative ways of generating, composing, and harmonizing sub-scenes. Further, we wish to evaluate the composite image for effectiveness in both image quality and achieving the artist's intent. We argue that existing image quality metrics lack a holistic evaluation of image composites. To address this, we propose novel quality criteria especially relevant to composite generation. We believe that our approach provides an intuitive method of art creation. Through extensive user surveys, quantitative and qualitative analysis, we show how it achieves greater spatial, semantic, and creative control over image generation. In addition, our methods do not need to retrain or modify the architecture of the base diffusion models and can work in a plug-and-play manner with the fine-tuned models.

Mixed-initiative visual analytics (VA) systems, where human and artificial intelligence (AI) agents collaborate as equal partners during analysis, represented a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction. With recent advances in AI, these systems have seen an increase in sophisticated software agents that have improved task planning, reasoning, and completion capabilities. However, while existing work characterizes agent interplay and communication strategies, there is a limited understanding of the overarching design principles for intelligent agents. Through a systematic review of 90 systems (and 207 unique agents), we propose a design space of intelligent agents comprising six dimensions that collectively characterize an agent's perception, environmental understanding, action capability, and communication strategies. We contribute a novel framework for researchers and designers to explore various design choices for new systems and to situate a system in the current landscape. We conclude with future research opportunities for intelligent agents in mixed-initiative VA systems.

This paper introduces a generative model designed for multimodal control over text-to-image foundation generative AI models such as Stable Diffusion, specifically tailored for engineering design synthesis. Our model proposes parametric, image, and text control modalities to enhance design precision and diversity. Firstly, it handles both partial and complete parametric inputs using a diffusion model that acts as a design autocomplete co-pilot, coupled with a parametric encoder to process the information. Secondly, the model utilizes assembly graphs to systematically assemble input component images, which are then processed through a component encoder to capture essential visual data. Thirdly, textual descriptions are integrated via CLIP encoding, ensuring a comprehensive interpretation of design intent. These diverse inputs are synthesized through a multimodal fusion technique, creating a joint embedding that acts as the input to a module inspired by ControlNet. This integration allows the model to apply robust multimodal control to foundation models, facilitating the generation of complex and precise engineering designs. This approach broadens the capabilities of AI-driven design tools and demonstrates significant advancements in precise control based on diverse data modalities for enhanced design generation.

We introduce GraphicDesignBench (GDB), the first comprehensive benchmark suite designed specifically to evaluate AI models on the full breadth of professional graphic design tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on natural-image understanding or generic text-to-image synthesis, GDB targets the unique challenges of professional design work: translating communicative intent into structured layouts, rendering typographically faithful text, manipulating layered compositions, producing valid vector graphics, and reasoning about animation. The suite comprises 50 tasks organized along five axes: layout, typography, infographics, template & design semantics and animation, each evaluated under both understanding and generation settings, and grounded in real-world design templates drawn from the LICA layered-composition dataset. We evaluate a set of frontier closed-source models using a standardized metric taxonomy covering spatial accuracy, perceptual quality, text fidelity, semantic alignment, and structural validity. Our results reveal that current models fall short on the core challenges of professional design: spatial reasoning over complex layouts, faithful vector code generation, fine-grained typographic perception, and temporal decomposition of animations remain largely unsolved. While high-level semantic understanding is within reach, the gap widens sharply as tasks demand precision, structure, and compositional awareness. GDB provides a rigorous, reproducible testbed for tracking progress toward AI systems that can function as capable design collaborators. The full evaluation framework is publicly available.

Interior design allows us to be who we are and live how we want - each design is as unique as our distinct personality. However, it is not trivial for non-professionals to express and materialize this since it requires aligning functional and visual expectations with the constraints of physical space; this renders interior design a luxury. To make it more accessible, we present I-Design, a personalized interior designer that allows users to generate and visualize their design goals through natural language communication. I-Design starts with a team of large language model agents that engage in dialogues and logical reasoning with one another, transforming textual user input into feasible scene graph designs with relative object relationships. Subsequently, an effective placement algorithm determines optimal locations for each object within the scene. The final design is then constructed in 3D by retrieving and integrating assets from an existing object database. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation protocol that utilizes a vision-language model and complements the design pipeline. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that I-Design outperforms existing methods in delivering high-quality 3D design solutions and aligning with abstract concepts that match user input, showcasing its advantages across detailed 3D arrangement and conceptual fidelity.

To mitigate the computational complexity in the self-attention mechanism on long sequences, linear attention utilizes computation tricks to achieve linear complexity, while state space models (SSMs) popularize a favorable practice of using non-data-dependent memory pattern, i.e., emphasize the near and neglect the distant, to processing sequences. Recent studies have shown the priorities by combining them as one. However, the efficiency of linear attention remains only at the theoretical level in a causal setting, and SSMs require various designed constraints to operate effectively on specific data. Therefore, in order to unveil the true power of the hybrid design, the following two issues need to be addressed: (1) hardware-efficient implementation for linear attention and (2) stabilization of SSMs. To achieve this, we leverage the thought of tiling and hierarchy to propose CHELA (short-long Convolutions with Hardware-Efficient Linear Attention), which replaces SSMs with short-long convolutions and implements linear attention in a divide-and-conquer manner. This approach enjoys global abstraction and data-dependent selection from stable SSM and linear attention while maintaining real linear complexity. Our comprehensive experiments on the Long Range Arena benchmark and language modeling tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-fidelity images, but they often fail in handling complex spatial relationships, e.g., spatial perception, reasoning, or interaction. These critical aspects are largely overlooked by current benchmarks due to their short or information-sparse prompt design. In this paper, we introduce SpatialGenEval, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the spatial intelligence of T2I models, covering two key aspects: (1) SpatialGenEval involves 1,230 long, information-dense prompts across 25 real-world scenes. Each prompt integrates 10 spatial sub-domains and corresponding 10 multi-choice question-answer pairs, ranging from object position and layout to occlusion and causality. Our extensive evaluation of 21 state-of-the-art models reveals that higher-order spatial reasoning remains a primary bottleneck. (2) To demonstrate that the utility of our information-dense design goes beyond simple evaluation, we also construct the SpatialT2I dataset. It contains 15,400 text-image pairs with rewritten prompts to ensure image consistency while preserving information density. Fine-tuned results on current foundation models (i.e., Stable Diffusion-XL, Uniworld-V1, OmniGen2) yield consistent performance gains (+4.2%, +5.7%, +4.4%) and more realistic effects in spatial relations, highlighting a data-centric paradigm to achieve spatial intelligence in T2I models.

Graphic design often involves exploring different stylistic directions, which can be time-consuming for non-experts. We address this problem of stylistically improving designs based on natural language instructions. While VLMs have shown initial success in graphic design, their pretrained knowledge on styles is often too general and misaligned with specific domain data. For example, VLMs may associate minimalism with abstract designs, whereas designers emphasize shape and color choices. Our key insight is to leverage design data -- a collection of real-world designs that implicitly capture designer's principles -- to learn design knowledge and guide stylistic improvement. We propose PRISM (PRior-Informed Stylistic Modification) that constructs and applies a design knowledge base through three stages: (1) clustering high-variance designs to capture diversity within a style, (2) summarizing each cluster into actionable design knowledge, and (3) retrieving relevant knowledge during inference to enable style-aware improvement. Experiments on the Crello dataset show that PRISM achieves the highest average rank of 1.49 (closer to 1 is better) over baselines in style alignment. User studies further validate these results, showing that PRISM is consistently preferred by designers.

We introduce Multi-Objective Counterfactuals for Design (MCD), a novel method for counterfactual optimization in design problems. Counterfactuals are hypothetical situations that can lead to a different decision or choice. In this paper, the authors frame the counterfactual search problem as a design recommendation tool that can help identify modifications to a design, leading to better functional performance. MCD improves upon existing counterfactual search methods by supporting multi-objective queries, which are crucial in design problems, and by decoupling the counterfactual search and sampling processes, thus enhancing efficiency and facilitating objective tradeoff visualization. The paper demonstrates MCD's core functionality using a two-dimensional test case, followed by three case studies of bicycle design that showcase MCD's effectiveness in real-world design problems. In the first case study, MCD excels at recommending modifications to query designs that can significantly enhance functional performance, such as weight savings and improvements to the structural safety factor. The second case study demonstrates that MCD can work with a pre-trained language model to suggest design changes based on a subjective text prompt effectively. Lastly, the authors task MCD with increasing a query design's similarity to a target image and text prompt while simultaneously reducing weight and improving structural performance, demonstrating MCD's performance on a complex multimodal query. Overall, MCD has the potential to provide valuable recommendations for practitioners and design automation researchers looking for answers to their ``What if'' questions by exploring hypothetical design modifications and their impact on multiple design objectives. The code, test problems, and datasets used in the paper are available to the public at decode.mit.edu/projects/counterfactuals/.

Recent multimodal face generation models address the spatial control limitations of text-to-image diffusion models by augmenting text-based conditioning with spatial priors such as segmentation masks, sketches, or edge maps. This multimodal fusion enables controllable synthesis aligned with both high-level semantic intent and low-level structural layout. However, most existing approaches typically extend pre-trained text-to-image pipelines by appending auxiliary control modules or stitching together separate uni-modal networks. These ad hoc designs inherit architectural constraints, duplicate parameters, and often fail under conflicting modalities or mismatched latent spaces, limiting their ability to perform synergistic fusion across semantic and spatial domains. We introduce MMFace-DiT, a unified dual-stream diffusion transformer engineered for synergistic multimodal face synthesis. Its core novelty lies in a dual-stream transformer block that processes spatial (mask/sketch) and semantic (text) tokens in parallel, deeply fusing them through a shared Rotary Position-Embedded (RoPE) Attention mechanism. This design prevents modal dominance and ensures strong adherence to both text and structural priors to achieve unprecedented spatial-semantic consistency for controllable face generation. Furthermore, a novel Modality Embedder enables a single cohesive model to dynamically adapt to varying spatial conditions without retraining. MMFace-DiT achieves a 40% improvement in visual fidelity and prompt alignment over six state-of-the-art multimodal face generation models, establishing a flexible new paradigm for end-to-end controllable generative modeling. The code and dataset are available on our project page: https://vcbsl.github.io/MMFace-DiT/

Text-to-image (T2I) models enable rapid concept design, making them widely used in AI-driven design. While recent studies focus on generating semantic and stylistic variations of given design concepts, functional coherence--the integration of multiple affordances into a single coherent concept--remains largely overlooked. In this paper, we introduce SYNTHIA, a framework for generating novel, functionally coherent designs based on desired affordances. Our approach leverages a hierarchical concept ontology that decomposes concepts into parts and affordances, serving as a crucial building block for functionally coherent design. We also develop a curriculum learning scheme based on our ontology that contrastively fine-tunes T2I models to progressively learn affordance composition while maintaining visual novelty. To elaborate, we (i) gradually increase affordance distance, guiding models from basic concept-affordance association to complex affordance compositions that integrate parts of distinct affordances into a single, coherent form, and (ii) enforce visual novelty by employing contrastive objectives to push learned representations away from existing concepts. Experimental results show that SYNTHIA outperforms state-of-the-art T2I models, demonstrating absolute gains of 25.1% and 14.7% for novelty and functional coherence in human evaluation, respectively.

The creation of manufacturable and editable 3D shapes through Computer-Aided Design (CAD) remains a highly manual and time-consuming task, hampered by the complex topology of boundary representations of 3D solids and unintuitive design tools. While most work in the 3D shape generation literature focuses on representations like meshes, voxels, or point clouds, practical engineering applications demand the modifiability and manufacturability of CAD models and the ability for multi-modal conditional CAD model generation. This paper introduces GenCAD, a generative model that employs autoregressive transformers with a contrastive learning framework and latent diffusion models to transform image inputs into parametric CAD command sequences, resulting in editable 3D shape representations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that GenCAD significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of the unconditional and conditional generations of CAD models. Additionally, the contrastive learning framework of GenCAD facilitates the retrieval of CAD models using image queries from large CAD databases, which is a critical challenge within the CAD community. Our results provide a significant step forward in highlighting the potential of generative models to expedite the entire design-to-production pipeline and seamlessly integrate different design modalities.

We present SpaceTimePilot, a video diffusion model that disentangles space and time for controllable generative rendering. Given a monocular video, SpaceTimePilot can independently alter the camera viewpoint and the motion sequence within the generative process, re-rendering the scene for continuous and arbitrary exploration across space and time. To achieve this, we introduce an effective animation time-embedding mechanism in the diffusion process, allowing explicit control of the output video's motion sequence with respect to that of the source video. As no datasets provide paired videos of the same dynamic scene with continuous temporal variations, we propose a simple yet effective temporal-warping training scheme that repurposes existing multi-view datasets to mimic temporal differences. This strategy effectively supervises the model to learn temporal control and achieve robust space-time disentanglement. To further enhance the precision of dual control, we introduce two additional components: an improved camera-conditioning mechanism that allows altering the camera from the first frame, and CamxTime, the first synthetic space-and-time full-coverage rendering dataset that provides fully free space-time video trajectories within a scene. Joint training on the temporal-warping scheme and the CamxTime dataset yields more precise temporal control. We evaluate SpaceTimePilot on both real-world and synthetic data, demonstrating clear space-time disentanglement and strong results compared to prior work. Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/Space-Time-Pilot/ Code: https://github.com/ZheningHuang/spacetimepilot

In this work, we investigate automatic design composition from multimodal graphic elements. Although recent studies have developed various generative models for graphic design, they usually face the following limitations: they only focus on certain subtasks and are far from achieving the design composition task; they do not consider the hierarchical information of graphic designs during the generation process. To tackle these issues, we introduce the layered design principle into Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and propose a novel approach, called LaDeCo, to accomplish this challenging task. Specifically, LaDeCo first performs layer planning for a given element set, dividing the input elements into different semantic layers according to their contents. Based on the planning results, it subsequently predicts element attributes that control the design composition in a layer-wise manner, and includes the rendered image of previously generated layers into the context. With this insightful design, LaDeCo decomposes the difficult task into smaller manageable steps, making the generation process smoother and clearer. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LaDeCo in design composition. Furthermore, we show that LaDeCo enables some interesting applications in graphic design, such as resolution adjustment, element filling, design variation, etc. In addition, it even outperforms the specialized models in some design subtasks without any task-specific training.

Graphics design is important for various applications, including movie production and game design. To create a high-quality scene, designers usually need to spend hours in software like Blender, in which they might need to interleave and repeat operations, such as connecting material nodes, hundreds of times. Moreover, slightly different design goals may require completely different sequences, making automation difficult. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like GPT-4V, to intelligently search the design action space to arrive at an answer that can satisfy a user's intent. Specifically, we design a vision-based edit generator and state evaluator to work together to find the correct sequence of actions to achieve the goal. Inspired by the role of visual imagination in the human design process, we supplement the visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs with "imagined" reference images from image-generation models, providing visual grounding of abstract language descriptions. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence suggesting our system can produce simple but tedious Blender editing sequences for tasks such as editing procedural materials from text and/or reference images, as well as adjusting lighting configurations for product renderings in complex scenes.

Autoregressive (AR) diffusion enables streaming, interactive long-video generation by producing frames causally, yet maintaining coherence over minute-scale horizons remains challenging due to accumulated errors, motion drift, and content repetition. We approach this problem from a memory perspective, treating video synthesis as a recurrent dynamical process that requires coordinated short- and long-term context. We propose VideoSSM, a Long Video Model that unifies AR diffusion with a hybrid state-space memory. The state-space model (SSM) serves as an evolving global memory of scene dynamics across the entire sequence, while a context window provides local memory for motion cues and fine details. This hybrid design preserves global consistency without frozen, repetitive patterns, supports prompt-adaptive interaction, and scales in linear time with sequence length. Experiments on short- and long-range benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art temporal consistency and motion stability among autoregressive video generator especially at minute-scale horizons, enabling content diversity and interactive prompt-based control, thereby establishing a scalable, memory-aware framework for long video generation.

We introduce DEsignBench, a text-to-image (T2I) generation benchmark tailored for visual design scenarios. Recent T2I models like DALL-E 3 and others, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating photorealistic images that align closely with textual inputs. While the allure of creating visually captivating images is undeniable, our emphasis extends beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. We aim to investigate the potential of using these powerful models in authentic design contexts. In pursuit of this goal, we develop DEsignBench, which incorporates test samples designed to assess T2I models on both "design technical capability" and "design application scenario." Each of these two dimensions is supported by a diverse set of specific design categories. We explore DALL-E 3 together with other leading T2I models on DEsignBench, resulting in a comprehensive visual gallery for side-by-side comparisons. For DEsignBench benchmarking, we perform human evaluations on generated images in DEsignBench gallery, against the criteria of image-text alignment, visual aesthetic, and design creativity. Our evaluation also considers other specialized design capabilities, including text rendering, layout composition, color harmony, 3D design, and medium style. In addition to human evaluations, we introduce the first automatic image generation evaluator powered by GPT-4V. This evaluator provides ratings that align well with human judgments, while being easily replicable and cost-efficient. A high-resolution version is available at https://github.com/design-bench/design-bench.github.io/raw/main/designbench.pdf?download=

Text-to-3D (T23D) generation has transformed digital content creation, yet remains bottlenecked by blind trial-and-error prompting processes that yield unpredictable results. While visual prompt engineering has advanced in text-to-image domains, its application to 3D generation presents unique challenges requiring multi-view consistency evaluation and spatial understanding. We present Sel3DCraft, a visual prompt engineering system for T23D that transforms unstructured exploration into a guided visual process. Our approach introduces three key innovations: a dual-branch structure combining retrieval and generation for diverse candidate exploration; a multi-view hybrid scoring approach that leverages MLLMs with innovative high-level metrics to assess 3D models with human-expert consistency; and a prompt-driven visual analytics suite that enables intuitive defect identification and refinement. Extensive testing and user studies demonstrate that Sel3DCraft surpasses other T23D systems in supporting creativity for designers.

Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.

We introduce ResPlan, a large-scale dataset of 17,000 detailed, structurally rich, and realistic residential floor plans, created to advance spatial AI research. Each plan includes precise annotations of architectural elements (walls, doors, windows, balconies) and functional spaces (such as kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms). ResPlan addresses key limitations of existing datasets such as RPLAN (Wu et al., 2019) and MSD (van Engelenburg et al., 2024) by offering enhanced visual fidelity and greater structural diversity, reflecting realistic and non-idealized residential layouts. Designed as a versatile, general-purpose resource, ResPlan supports a wide range of applications including robotics, reinforcement learning, generative AI, virtual and augmented reality, simulations, and game development. Plans are provided in both geometric and graph-based formats, enabling direct integration into simulation engines and fast 3D conversion. A key contribution is an open-source pipeline for geometry cleaning, alignment, and annotation refinement. Additionally, ResPlan includes structured representations of room connectivity, supporting graph-based spatial reasoning tasks. Finally, we present comparative analyses with existing benchmarks and outline several open benchmark tasks enabled by ResPlan. Ultimately, ResPlan offers a significant advance in scale, realism, and usability, providing a robust foundation for developing and benchmarking next-generation spatial intelligence systems.

Designing user interfaces (UIs) is a critical step when launching products, building portfolios, or personalizing projects, yet end users without design expertise often struggle to articulate their intent and to trust design choices. Existing example-based tools either promote broad exploration, which can cause overwhelm and design drift, or require adapting a single example, risking design fixation. We present UI Remix, an interactive system that supports mobile UI design through an example-driven design workflow. Powered by a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (MMRAG) model, UI Remix enables iterative search, selection, and adaptation of examples at both the global (whole interface) and local (component) level. To foster trust, it presents source transparency cues such as ratings, download counts, and developer information. In an empirical study with 24 end users, UI Remix significantly improved participants' ability to achieve their design goals, facilitated effective iteration, and encouraged exploration of alternative designs. Participants also reported that source transparency cues enhanced their confidence in adapting examples. Our findings suggest new directions for AI-assisted, example-driven systems that empower end users to design with greater control, trust, and openness to exploration.

Controllable layout generation refers to the process of creating a plausible visual arrangement of elements within a graphic design (e.g., document and web designs) with constraints representing design intentions. Although recent diffusion-based models have achieved state-of-the-art FID scores, they tend to exhibit more pronounced misalignment compared to earlier transformer-based models. In this work, we propose the LAyout Constraint diffusion modEl (LACE), a unified model to handle a broad range of layout generation tasks, such as arranging elements with specified attributes and refining or completing a coarse layout design. The model is based on continuous diffusion models. Compared with existing methods that use discrete diffusion models, continuous state-space design can enable the incorporation of differentiable aesthetic constraint functions in training. For conditional generation, we introduce conditions via masked input. Extensive experiment results show that LACE produces high-quality layouts and outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.

The pursuit of controllability as a higher standard of visual content creation has yielded remarkable progress in customizable image synthesis. However, achieving controllable video synthesis remains challenging due to the large variation of temporal dynamics and the requirement of cross-frame temporal consistency. Based on the paradigm of compositional generation, this work presents VideoComposer that allows users to flexibly compose a video with textual conditions, spatial conditions, and more importantly temporal conditions. Specifically, considering the characteristic of video data, we introduce the motion vector from compressed videos as an explicit control signal to provide guidance regarding temporal dynamics. In addition, we develop a Spatio-Temporal Condition encoder (STC-encoder) that serves as a unified interface to effectively incorporate the spatial and temporal relations of sequential inputs, with which the model could make better use of temporal conditions and hence achieve higher inter-frame consistency. Extensive experimental results suggest that VideoComposer is able to control the spatial and temporal patterns simultaneously within a synthesized video in various forms, such as text description, sketch sequence, reference video, or even simply hand-crafted motions. The code and models will be publicly available at https://videocomposer.github.io.

Spatio-temporal predictive learning is a learning paradigm that enables models to learn spatial and temporal patterns by predicting future frames from given past frames in an unsupervised manner. Despite remarkable progress in recent years, a lack of systematic understanding persists due to the diverse settings, complex implementation, and difficult reproducibility. Without standardization, comparisons can be unfair and insights inconclusive. To address this dilemma, we propose OpenSTL, a comprehensive benchmark for spatio-temporal predictive learning that categorizes prevalent approaches into recurrent-based and recurrent-free models. OpenSTL provides a modular and extensible framework implementing various state-of-the-art methods. We conduct standard evaluations on datasets across various domains, including synthetic moving object trajectory, human motion, driving scenes, traffic flow and weather forecasting. Based on our observations, we provide a detailed analysis of how model architecture and dataset properties affect spatio-temporal predictive learning performance. Surprisingly, we find that recurrent-free models achieve a good balance between efficiency and performance than recurrent models. Thus, we further extend the common MetaFormers to boost recurrent-free spatial-temporal predictive learning. We open-source the code and models at https://github.com/chengtan9907/OpenSTL.

Autoregressive video diffusion models have proved effective for world modeling and interactive scene generation, with Minecraft gameplay as a representative application. To faithfully simulate play, a model must generate natural content while exploring new scenes and preserve spatial consistency when revisiting explored areas. Under limited computation budgets, it must compress and exploit historical cues within a finite context window, which exposes a trade-off: Temporal-only memory lacks long-term spatial consistency, whereas adding spatial memory strengthens consistency but may degrade new scene generation quality when the model over-relies on insufficient spatial context. We present Memory Forcing, a learning framework that pairs training protocols with a geometry-indexed spatial memory. Hybrid Training exposes distinct gameplay regimes, guiding the model to rely on temporal memory during exploration and incorporate spatial memory for revisits. Chained Forward Training extends autoregressive training with model rollouts, where chained predictions create larger pose variations and encourage reliance on spatial memory for maintaining consistency. Point-to-Frame Retrieval efficiently retrieves history by mapping currently visible points to their source frames, while Incremental 3D Reconstruction maintains and updates an explicit 3D cache. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Memory Forcing achieves superior long-term spatial consistency and generative quality across diverse environments, while maintaining computational efficiency for extended sequences.

Recent advancements in video generation have witnessed significant progress, especially with the rapid advancement of diffusion models. Despite this, their deficiencies in physical cognition have gradually received widespread attention - generated content often violates the fundamental laws of physics, falling into the dilemma of ''visual realism but physical absurdity". Researchers began to increasingly recognize the importance of physical fidelity in video generation and attempted to integrate heuristic physical cognition such as motion representations and physical knowledge into generative systems to simulate real-world dynamic scenarios. Considering the lack of a systematic overview in this field, this survey aims to provide a comprehensive summary of architecture designs and their applications to fill this gap. Specifically, we discuss and organize the evolutionary process of physical cognition in video generation from a cognitive science perspective, while proposing a three-tier taxonomy: 1) basic schema perception for generation, 2) passive cognition of physical knowledge for generation, and 3) active cognition for world simulation, encompassing state-of-the-art methods, classical paradigms, and benchmarks. Subsequently, we emphasize the inherent key challenges in this domain and delineate potential pathways for future research, contributing to advancing the frontiers of discussion in both academia and industry. Through structured review and interdisciplinary analysis, this survey aims to provide directional guidance for developing interpretable, controllable, and physically consistent video generation paradigms, thereby propelling generative models from the stage of ''visual mimicry'' towards a new phase of ''human-like physical comprehension''.

Research and practice in Intelligent Design (ID) have significantly enhanced engineering innovation, efficiency, quality, and productivity over recent decades, fundamentally reshaping how engineering designers think, behave, and interact with design processes. The recent emergence of Foundation Models (FMs), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has demonstrated general knowledge-based reasoning capabilities, and open new paths and avenues for further transformation in engineering design. In this context, this paper introduces Intelligent Design 4.0 (ID 4.0) as an emerging paradigm empowered by agentic AI systems. We review the historical evolution of ID across four distinct stages: rule-based expert systems, task-specific machine learning models, large-scale foundation AI models, and the recent emerging paradigm of multi-agent collaboration. We propose a conceptual framework for ID 4.0 and discuss its potential to support end-to-end automation of engineering design processes through coordinated, autonomous multi-agent-based systems. Furthermore, we discuss future perspectives to enhance and fully realize ID 4.0's potential, including more complex design scenarios, more practical design implementations, novel agent coordination mechanisms, and autonomous design goal-setting with better human value alignment. In sum, these insights lay a foundation for advancing Intelligent Design toward greater adaptivity, autonomy, and effectiveness in addressing increasingly complex design challenges.

Reasoning about dynamic spatial relationships is essential, as both observers and objects often move simultaneously. Although vision-language models (VLMs) and visual expertise models excel in 2D tasks and static scenarios, their ability to fully understand dynamic 3D scenarios remains limited. We introduce Dynamic Spatial Intelligence and propose DSI-Bench, a benchmark with nearly 1,000 dynamic videos and over 1,700 manually annotated questions covering nine decoupled motion patterns of observers and objects. Spatially and temporally symmetric designs reduce biases and enable systematic evaluation of models' reasoning about self-motion and object motion. Our evaluation of 14 VLMs and expert models reveals key limitations: models often conflate observer and object motion, exhibit semantic biases, and fail to accurately infer relative relationships in dynamic scenarios. Our DSI-Bench provides valuable findings and insights about the future development of general and expertise models with dynamic spatial intelligence.

As deep learning technology advances and more urban spatial-temporal data accumulates, an increasing number of deep learning models are being proposed to solve urban spatial-temporal prediction problems. However, there are limitations in the existing field, including open-source data being in various formats and difficult to use, few papers making their code and data openly available, and open-source models often using different frameworks and platforms, making comparisons challenging. A standardized framework is urgently needed to implement and evaluate these methods. To address these issues, we propose LibCity, an open-source library that offers researchers a credible experimental tool and a convenient development framework. In this library, we have reproduced 65 spatial-temporal prediction models and collected 55 spatial-temporal datasets, allowing researchers to conduct comprehensive experiments conveniently. By enabling fair model comparisons, designing a unified data storage format, and simplifying the process of developing new models, LibCity is poised to make significant contributions to the spatial-temporal prediction field.

We introduce LICA (Layered Image Composition Annotations), a large-scale dataset of 1,550,244 multi-layer graphic design compositions designed to advance structured understanding and generation of graphic layouts1. In addition to ren- dered PNG images, LICA represents each design as a hierarchical composition of typed components including text, image, vector, and group elements, each paired with rich per-element metadata such as spatial geometry, typographic attributes, opacity, and visibility. The dataset spans 20 design categories and 971,850 unique templates, providing broad coverage of real-world design structures. We further introduce graphic design video as a new and largely unexplored challenge for current vision-language models through 27,261 animated layouts annotated with per-component keyframes and motion parameters. Beyond scale, LICA establishes a new paradigm of research tasks for graphic design, enabling structured investiga- tions into problems such as layer-aware inpainting, structured layout generation, controlled design editing, and temporally-aware generative modeling. By repre- senting design as a system of compositional layers and relationships, the dataset supports research on models that operate directly on design structure rather than pixels alone.

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In this work, we explore the effects of Continued Pretraining (CPT), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and various preference-based optimization approaches, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO), on fine-tuned LLM performance. Our analysis shows how these strategies influence model outcomes and reveals that the merging of multiple fine-tuned models can lead to the emergence of capabilities that surpass the individual contributions of the parent models. We find that model merging leads to new functionalities that neither parent model could achieve alone, leading to improved performance in domain-specific assessments. Experiments with different model architectures are presented, including Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral 7B models, where similar behaviors are observed. Exploring whether the results hold also for much smaller models, we use a tiny LLM with 1.7 billion parameters and show that very small LLMs do not necessarily feature emergent capabilities under model merging, suggesting that model scaling may be a key component. In open-ended yet consistent chat conversations between a human and AI models, our assessment reveals detailed insights into how different model variants perform and show that the smallest model achieves a high intelligence score across key criteria including reasoning depth, creativity, clarity, and quantitative precision. Other experiments include the development of image generation prompts based on disparate biological material design concepts, to create new microstructures, architectural concepts, and urban design based on biological materials-inspired construction principles.

Recent progress in large language models demonstrates that hybrid architectures--combining self-attention mechanisms with structured state space models like Mamba--can achieve a compelling balance between modeling quality and computational efficiency, particularly for long-context tasks. While these hybrid models show promising performance, systematic comparisons of hybridization strategies and analyses on the key factors behind their effectiveness have not been clearly shared to the community. In this work, we present a holistic evaluation of hybrid architectures based on inter-layer (sequential) or intra-layer (parallel) fusion. We evaluate these designs from a variety of perspectives: language modeling performance, long-context capabilities, scaling analysis, and training and inference efficiency. By investigating the core characteristics of their computational primitive, we identify the most critical elements for each hybridization strategy and further propose optimal design recipes for both hybrid models. Our comprehensive analysis provides practical guidance and valuable insights for developing hybrid language models, facilitating the optimization of architectural configurations.

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal search engine for interior design that combines visual and textual queries. The goal of our engine is to retrieve interior objects, e.g. furniture or wall clocks, that share visual and aesthetic similarities with the query. Our search engine allows the user to take a photo of a room and retrieve with a high recall a list of items identical or visually similar to those present in the photo. Additionally, it allows to return other items that aesthetically and stylistically fit well together. To achieve this goal, our system blends the results obtained using textual and visual modalities. Thanks to this blending strategy, we increase the average style similarity score of the retrieved items by 11%. Our work is implemented as a Web-based application and it is planned to be opened to the public.

Inverse design, where we seek to design input variables in order to optimize an underlying objective function, is an important problem that arises across fields such as mechanical engineering to aerospace engineering. Inverse design is typically formulated as an optimization problem, with recent works leveraging optimization across learned dynamics models. However, as models are optimized they tend to fall into adversarial modes, preventing effective sampling. We illustrate that by instead optimizing over the learned energy function captured by the diffusion model, we can avoid such adversarial examples and significantly improve design performance. We further illustrate how such a design system is compositional, enabling us to combine multiple different diffusion models representing subcomponents of our desired system to design systems with every specified component. In an N-body interaction task and a challenging 2D multi-airfoil design task, we demonstrate that by composing the learned diffusion model at test time, our method allows us to design initial states and boundary shapes that are more complex than those in the training data. Our method generalizes to more objects for N-body dataset and discovers formation flying to minimize drag in the multi-airfoil design task. Project website and code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/cindm.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are central to modern design workflows, offering scaling without distortion and precise editability. However, for single object SVGs, generating multi-view consistent SVGs from a single-view input remains underexplored. We present a three stage framework that produces multi-view SVGs with geometric and color consistency from a single SVG input. First, the rasterized input is lifted to a 3D representation and rendered under target camera poses, producing multi-view images of the object. Next, we extend the temporal memory mechanism of Segment Anything 2 (SAM2) to the spatial domain, constructing a spatial memory bank that establishes part level correspondences across neighboring views, yielding cleaner and more consistent vector paths and color assignments without retraining. Finally, during the raster to vector conversion, we perform path consolidation and structural optimization to reduce redundancy while preserving boundaries and semantics. The resulting SVGs exhibit strong geometric and color consistency across views, significantly reduce redundant paths, and retain fine structural details. This work bridges generative modeling and structured vector representation, providing a scalable route to single input, object level multi-view SVG generation and supporting applications such as asset creation and semantic vector editing.

We propose SpatialLLM, a novel approach advancing spatial intelligence tasks in complex urban scenes. Unlike previous methods requiring geographic analysis tools or domain expertise, SpatialLLM is a unified language model directly addressing various spatial intelligence tasks without any training, fine-tuning, or expert intervention. The core of SpatialLLM lies in constructing detailed and structured scene descriptions from raw spatial data to prompt pre-trained LLMs for scene-based analysis. Extensive experiments show that, with our designs, pretrained LLMs can accurately perceive spatial distribution information and enable zero-shot execution of advanced spatial intelligence tasks, including urban planning, ecological analysis, traffic management, etc. We argue that multi-field knowledge, context length, and reasoning ability are key factors influencing LLM performances in urban analysis. We hope that SpatialLLM will provide a novel viable perspective for urban intelligent analysis and management. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/SpatialLLM.

Parametric computer-aided design (CAD) tools are the predominant way that engineers specify physical structures, from bicycle pedals to airplanes to printed circuit boards. The key characteristic of parametric CAD is that design intent is encoded not only via geometric primitives, but also by parameterized constraints between the elements. This relational specification can be viewed as the construction of a constraint program, allowing edits to coherently propagate to other parts of the design. Machine learning offers the intriguing possibility of accelerating the design process via generative modeling of these structures, enabling new tools such as autocompletion, constraint inference, and conditional synthesis. In this work, we present such an approach to generative modeling of parametric CAD sketches, which constitute the basic computational building blocks of modern mechanical design. Our model, trained on real-world designs from the SketchGraphs dataset, autoregressively synthesizes sketches as sequences of primitives, with initial coordinates, and constraints that reference back to the sampled primitives. As samples from the model match the constraint graph representation used in standard CAD software, they may be directly imported, solved, and edited according to downstream design tasks. In addition, we condition the model on various contexts, including partial sketches (primers) and images of hand-drawn sketches. Evaluation of the proposed approach demonstrates its ability to synthesize realistic CAD sketches and its potential to aid the mechanical design workflow.

Mediated by today's visual displays, information space allows users to discover, access and interact with a wide range of digital and physical information. The information presented in this space may be digital, physical or a blend of both, and appear across different dimensions - such as texts, images, 3D content and physical objects embedded within real-world environment. Navigating within the information space often involves interacting with mixed-dimensional entities, visually represented in both 2D and 3D. At times, interactions also involve transitioning among entities represented in different dimensions. We introduce the concept of mixed-dimensional information space, encompassing entities represented in both 2D and 3D. Interactions within the mixed-dimensional information space should be seamless and efficient: users should be able to focus on their primary tasks without being distracted by interactions with or transitions between entities. While incorporating 3D representations into the mixed-dimensional information space offers intuitive and immersive ways to interact with complex information, it is important to address potential seams and inefficiencies that arise while interacting with both 2D and 3D entities. This dissertation introduces new interactive techniques and systems to realize seamless and efficient interactions within the mixed-dimensional information space. This dissertation introduces three interactive systems: MemoVis which aims to use emergent generative AI to help users create reference images for 3D design feedback; PaperToPlace which demonstrates how paper-based instruction documents can be transformed and spatialized into a context-aware MR experience; and VRContour which explores how contour delineation workflow can be brought into VR.

Computer-aided design (CAD) significantly enhances the efficiency, accuracy, and innovation of design processes by enabling precise 2D and 3D modeling, extensive analysis, and optimization. Existing methods for creating CAD models rely on latent vectors or point clouds, which are difficult to obtain and costly to store. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have inspired researchers to use natural language instructions and images for CAD model construction. However, these models still struggle with inferring accurate 3D spatial location and orientation, leading to inaccuracies in determining the spatial 3D starting points and extrusion directions for constructing geometries. This work introduces CAD-GPT, a CAD synthesis method with spatial reasoning-enhanced MLLM that takes either a single image or a textual description as input. To achieve precise spatial inference, our approach introduces a 3D Modeling Spatial Mechanism. This method maps 3D spatial positions and 3D sketch plane rotation angles into a 1D linguistic feature space using a specialized spatial unfolding mechanism, while discretizing 2D sketch coordinates into an appropriate planar space to enable precise determination of spatial starting position, sketch orientation, and 2D sketch coordinate translations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAD-GPT consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in CAD model synthesis, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Machine learning is a prevalent approach to tame the complexity of design space exploration for domain-specific architectures. Using ML for design space exploration poses challenges. First, it's not straightforward to identify the suitable algorithm from an increasing pool of ML methods. Second, assessing the trade-offs between performance and sample efficiency across these methods is inconclusive. Finally, lack of a holistic framework for fair, reproducible, and objective comparison across these methods hinders progress of adopting ML-aided architecture design space exploration and impedes creating repeatable artifacts. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce ArchGym, an open-source gym and easy-to-extend framework that connects diverse search algorithms to architecture simulators. To demonstrate utility, we evaluate ArchGym across multiple vanilla and domain-specific search algorithms in designing custom memory controller, deep neural network accelerators, and custom SoC for AR/VR workloads, encompassing over 21K experiments. Results suggest that with unlimited samples, ML algorithms are equally favorable to meet user-defined target specification if hyperparameters are tuned; no solution is necessarily better than another (e.g., reinforcement learning vs. Bayesian methods). We coin the term hyperparameter lottery to describe the chance for a search algorithm to find an optimal design provided meticulously selected hyperparameters. The ease of data collection and aggregation in ArchGym facilitates research in ML-aided architecture design space exploration. As a case study, we show this advantage by developing a proxy cost model with an RMSE of 0.61% that offers a 2,000-fold reduction in simulation time. Code and data for ArchGym is available at https://bit.ly/ArchGym.

3D creation has always been a unique human strength, driven by our ability to deconstruct and reassemble objects using our eyes, mind and hand. However, current 3D design tools struggle to replicate this natural process, requiring considerable artistic expertise and manual labor. This paper introduces BANG, a novel generative approach that bridges 3D generation and reasoning, allowing for intuitive and flexible part-level decomposition of 3D objects. At the heart of BANG is "Generative Exploded Dynamics", which creates a smooth sequence of exploded states for an input geometry, progressively separating parts while preserving their geometric and semantic coherence. BANG utilizes a pre-trained large-scale latent diffusion model, fine-tuned for exploded dynamics with a lightweight exploded view adapter, allowing precise control over the decomposition process. It also incorporates a temporal attention module to ensure smooth transitions and consistency across time. BANG enhances control with spatial prompts, such as bounding boxes and surface regions, enabling users to specify which parts to decompose and how. This interaction can be extended with multimodal models like GPT-4, enabling 2D-to-3D manipulations for more intuitive and creative workflows. The capabilities of BANG extend to generating detailed part-level geometry, associating parts with functional descriptions, and facilitating component-aware 3D creation and manufacturing workflows. Additionally, BANG offers applications in 3D printing, where separable parts are generated for easy printing and reassembly. In essence, BANG enables seamless transformation from imaginative concepts to detailed 3D assets, offering a new perspective on creation that resonates with human intuition.

One of the most critical tasks for startups is to validate their business model. Therefore, entrepreneurs try to collect information such as feedback from other actors to assess the validity of their assumptions and make decisions. However, previous work on decisional guidance for business model validation provides no solution for the highly uncertain and complex context of earlystage startups. The purpose of this paper is, thus, to develop design principles for a Hybrid Intelligence decision support system (HI-DSS) that combines the complementary capabilities of human and machine intelligence. We follow a design science research approach to design a prototype artifact and a set of design principles. Our study provides prescriptive knowledge for HI-DSS and contributes to previous work on decision support for business models, the applications of complementary strengths of humans and machines for making decisions, and support systems for extremely uncertain decision-making problems.

Creative coding and real-time shader programming are at the forefront of interactive digital art, enabling artists, designers, and enthusiasts to produce mesmerizing, complex visual effects that respond to real-time stimuli such as sound or user interaction. However, despite the rich potential of tools like GLSL, the steep learning curve and requirement for programming fluency pose substantial barriers for newcomers and even experienced artists who may not have a technical background. In this paper, we present AI Co-Artist, a novel interactive system that harnesses the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, to support the iterative evolution and refinement of GLSL shaders through a user-friendly, visually-driven interface. Drawing inspiration from the user-guided evolutionary principles pioneered by the Picbreeder platform, our system empowers users to evolve shader art using intuitive interactions, without needing to write or understand code. AI Co-Artist serves as both a creative companion and a technical assistant, allowing users to explore a vast generative design space of real-time visual art. Through comprehensive evaluations, including structured user studies and qualitative feedback, we demonstrate that AI Co-Artist significantly reduces the technical threshold for shader creation, enhances creative outcomes, and supports a wide range of users in producing professional-quality visual effects. Furthermore, we argue that this paradigm is broadly generalizable. By leveraging the dual strengths of LLMs-semantic understanding and program synthesis, our method can be applied to diverse creative domains, including website layout generation, architectural visualizations, product prototyping, and infographics.

While research on AI agents focuses on enabling them to operate graphical user interfaces, the most effective and widely adopted agent tools in practice are terminal-based. We argue that this convergence is not coincidental. It reflects three design properties central to effective human-AI-UI collaboration: representational compatibility between agent and interface, transparency of agent actions within the interaction medium, and low barriers to entry for human participants. We ground each property in established HCI theory, show how terminal-based tools satisfy them by default, and argue that any modality, including graphical and spatial interfaces, must be deliberately engineered to achieve them. Rather than a legacy artifact, the terminal serves as a design exemplar whose properties any agent-facing modality must replicate.

In recent years, large language models have achieved breakthroughs on a wide range of benchmarks in natural language processing and continue to increase in performance. Recently, the advances of large language models have raised interest outside the natural language processing community and could have a large impact on daily life. In this paper, we pose the question: How will large language models and other foundation models shape the future product development process? We provide the reader with an overview of the subject by summarizing both recent advances in natural language processing and the use of information technology in the engineering design process. We argue that discourse should be regarded as the core of engineering design processes, and therefore should be represented in a digital artifact. On this basis, we describe how foundation models such as large language models could contribute to the design discourse by automating parts thereof that involve creativity and reasoning, and were previously reserved for humans. We describe how simulations, experiments, topology optimizations, and other process steps can be integrated into a machine-actionable, discourse-centric design process. Finally, we outline the future research that will be necessary for the implementation of the conceptualized framework.

A critical factor in the success of decision support systems is the accurate modeling of user preferences. Psychology research has demonstrated that users often develop their preferences during the elicitation process, highlighting the pivotal role of system-user interaction in developing personalized systems. This paper introduces a novel approach, combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with Constraint Programming to facilitate interactive decision support. We study this hybrid framework through the lens of meeting scheduling, a time-consuming daily activity faced by a multitude of information workers. We conduct three studies to evaluate the novel framework, including a diary study (n=64) to characterize contextual scheduling preferences, a quantitative evaluation of the system's performance, and a user study (n=10) with a prototype system. Our work highlights the potential for a hybrid LLM and optimization approach for iterative preference elicitation and design considerations for building systems that support human-system collaborative decision-making processes.

Graphic design generation demands a delicate balance between high visual fidelity and fine-grained structural editability. However, existing approaches typically bifurcate into either non-editable raster image synthesis or abstract layout generation devoid of visual content. Recent combinations of these two approaches attempt to bridge this gap but often suffer from rigid composition schemas and unresolvable visual dissonances (e.g., text-background conflicts) due to their inexpressive representation and open-loop nature. To address these challenges, we propose DesignAsCode, a novel framework that reimagines graphic design as a programmatic synthesis task using HTML/CSS. Specifically, we introduce a Plan-Implement-Reflect pipeline, incorporating a Semantic Planner to construct dynamic, variable-depth element hierarchies and a Visual-Aware Reflection mechanism that iteratively optimizes the code to rectify rendering artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DesignAsCode significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both structural validity and aesthetic quality. Furthermore, our code-native representation unlocks advanced capabilities, including automatic layout retargeting, complex document generation (e.g., resumes), and CSS-based animation.

This position paper argues for, and offers, a critical lens through which to examine the current AI frenzy in the landscape architecture profession. In it, the authors propose five archetypes or mental modes that landscape architects might inhabit when thinking about AI. Rather than limiting judgments of AI use to a single axis of acceleration, these archetypes and corresponding narratives exist along a relational spectrum and are permeable, allowing LAs to take on and switch between them according to context. We model these relationships between the archetypes and their contributions to AI advancement using a causal loop diagram (CLD), and with those interactions argue that more nuanced ways of approaching AI might also open new modes of practice in the new digital economy.

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents have unlocked new possibilities for automating human tasks. While prior work has focused on well-defined tasks with specified goals, the capabilities of agents in creative design tasks with open-ended goals remain underexplored. We introduce GraphicBench, a new planning benchmark for graphic design that covers 1,079 user queries and input images across four design types. We further present GraphicTown, an LLM agent framework with three design experts and 46 actions (tools) to choose from for executing each step of the planned workflows in web environments. Experiments with six LLMs demonstrate their ability to generate workflows that integrate both explicit design constraints from user queries and implicit commonsense constraints. However, these workflows often do not lead to successful execution outcomes, primarily due to challenges in: (1) reasoning about spatial relationships, (2) coordinating global dependencies across experts, and (3) retrieving the most appropriate action per step. We envision GraphicBench as a challenging yet valuable testbed for advancing LLM-agent planning and execution in creative design tasks.

The generation of industrial Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models from user requests and specifications is crucial to enhancing efficiency in modern manufacturing. Traditional methods of CAD generation rely heavily on manual inputs and struggle with complex or non-standard designs, making them less suited for dynamic industrial needs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Text2CAD, a novel framework that employs stable diffusion models tailored to automate the generation process and efficiently bridge the gap between user specifications in text and functional CAD models. This approach directly translates the user's textural descriptions into detailed isometric images, which are then precisely converted into orthographic views, e.g., top, front, and side, providing sufficient information to reconstruct 3D CAD models. This process not only streamlines the creation of CAD models from textual descriptions but also ensures that the resulting models uphold physical and dimensional consistency essential for practical engineering applications. Our experimental results show that Text2CAD effectively generates technical drawings that are accurately translated into high-quality 3D CAD models, showing substantial potential to revolutionize CAD automation in response to user demands.

Generative models have had a profound impact on vision and language, paving the way for a new era of multimodal generative applications. While these successes have inspired researchers to explore using generative models in science and engineering to accelerate the design process and reduce the reliance on iterative optimization, challenges remain. Specifically, engineering optimization methods based on physics still outperform generative models when dealing with constrained environments where data is scarce and precision is paramount. To address these challenges, we introduce Diffusion Optimization Models (DOM) and Trajectory Alignment (TA), a learning framework that demonstrates the efficacy of aligning the sampling trajectory of diffusion models with the optimization trajectory derived from traditional physics-based methods. This alignment ensures that the sampling process remains grounded in the underlying physical principles. Our method allows for generating feasible and high-performance designs in as few as two steps without the need for expensive preprocessing, external surrogate models, or additional labeled data. We apply our framework to structural topology optimization, a fundamental problem in mechanical design, evaluating its performance on in- and out-of-distribution configurations. Our results demonstrate that TA outperforms state-of-the-art deep generative models on in-distribution configurations and halves the inference computational cost. When coupled with a few steps of optimization, it also improves manufacturability for out-of-distribution conditions. By significantly improving performance and inference efficiency, DOM enables us to generate high-quality designs in just a few steps and guide them toward regions of high performance and manufacturability, paving the way for the widespread application of generative models in large-scale data-driven design.

Designing model architectures requires decisions such as selecting operators (e.g., attention, convolution) and configurations (e.g., depth, width). However, evaluating the impact of these decisions on model quality requires costly pretraining, limiting architectural investigation. Inspired by how new software is built on existing code, we ask: can new architecture designs be studied using pretrained models? To this end, we present grafting, a simple approach for editing pretrained diffusion transformers (DiTs) to materialize new architectures under small compute budgets. Informed by our analysis of activation behavior and attention locality, we construct a testbed based on the DiT-XL/2 design to study the impact of grafting on model quality. Using this testbed, we develop a family of hybrid designs via grafting: replacing softmax attention with gated convolution, local attention, and linear attention, and replacing MLPs with variable expansion ratio and convolutional variants. Notably, many hybrid designs achieve good quality (FID: 2.38-2.64 vs. 2.27 for DiT-XL/2) using <2% pretraining compute. We then graft a text-to-image model (PixArt-Sigma), achieving a 1.43x speedup with less than a 2% drop in GenEval score. Finally, we present a case study that restructures DiT-XL/2 by converting every pair of sequential transformer blocks into parallel blocks via grafting. This reduces model depth by 2x and yields better quality (FID: 2.77) than other models of comparable depth. Together, we show that new diffusion model designs can be explored by grafting pretrained DiTs, with edits ranging from operator replacement to architecture restructuring. Code and grafted models: https://grafting.stanford.edu

One of the primary objectives of satellite remote sensing is to capture the complex dynamics of the Earth environment, which encompasses tasks such as reconstructing continuous cloud-free time series images, detecting land cover changes, and forecasting future surface evolution. However, existing methods typically require specialized models tailored to different tasks, lacking unified modeling of spatiotemporal features across multiple time series tasks. In this paper, we propose a Unified Time Series Generative Model (UniTS), a general framework applicable to various time series tasks, including time series reconstruction, time series cloud removal, time series semantic change detection, and time series forecasting. Based on the flow matching generative paradigm, UniTS constructs a deterministic evolution path from noise to targets under the guidance of task-specific conditions, achieving unified modeling of spatiotemporal representations for multiple tasks. The UniTS architecture consists of a diffusion transformer with spatio-temporal blocks, where we design an Adaptive Condition Injector (ACor) to enhance the model's conditional perception of multimodal inputs, enabling high-quality controllable generation. Additionally, we design a Spatiotemporal-aware Modulator (STM) to improve the ability of spatio-temporal blocks to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies. Furthermore, we construct two high-quality multimodal time series datasets, TS-S12 and TS-S12CR, filling the gap of benchmark datasets for time series cloud removal and forecasting tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniTS exhibits exceptional generative and cognitive capabilities in both low-level and high-level time series tasks. It significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly when facing challenges such as severe cloud contamination, modality absence, and forecasting phenological variations.

Architectural design is a highly complex practice that involves a wide diversity of disciplines, technologies, proprietary design software, expertise, and an almost infinite number of constraints, across a vast array of design tasks. Enabling intuitive, accessible, and scalable design processes is an important step towards performance-driven and sustainable design for all. To that end, we introduce Architext, a novel semantic generation assistive tool. Architext enables design generation with only natural language prompts, given to large-scale Language Models, as input. We conduct a thorough quantitative evaluation of Architext's downstream task performance, focusing on semantic accuracy and diversity for a number of pre-trained language models ranging from 120 million to 6 billion parameters. Architext models are able to learn the specific design task, generating valid residential layouts at a near 100% rate. Accuracy shows great improvement when scaling the models, with the largest model (GPT-J) yielding impressive accuracy ranging between 25% to over 80% for different prompt categories. We open source the finetuned Architext models and our synthetic dataset, hoping to inspire experimentation in this exciting area of design research.

Time is an important feature in many applications involving events that occur synchronously and/or asynchronously. To effectively consume time information, recent studies have focused on designing new architectures. In this paper, we take an orthogonal but complementary approach by providing a model-agnostic vector representation for time, called Time2Vec, that can be easily imported into many existing and future architectures and improve their performances. We show on a range of models and problems that replacing the notion of time with its Time2Vec representation improves the performance of the final model.

Graphic layout designs play an essential role in visual communication. Yet handcrafting layout designs is skill-demanding, time-consuming, and non-scalable to batch production. Generative models emerge to make design automation scalable but it remains non-trivial to produce designs that comply with designers' multimodal desires, i.e., constrained by background images and driven by foreground content. We propose LayoutDETR that inherits the high quality and realism from generative modeling, while reformulating content-aware requirements as a detection problem: we learn to detect in a background image the reasonable locations, scales, and spatial relations for multimodal foreground elements in a layout. Our solution sets a new state-of-the-art performance for layout generation on public benchmarks and on our newly-curated ad banner dataset. We integrate our solution into a graphical system that facilitates user studies, and show that users prefer our designs over baselines by significant margins. Our code, models, dataset, graphical system, and demos are available at https://github.com/salesforce/LayoutDETR.

Next-generation AI companions must go beyond general video understanding to resolve spatial and temporal references in dynamic, real-world environments. Existing Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs), while capable of coarse-level comprehension, struggle with fine-grained, spatiotemporal reasoning, especially when user queries rely on time-based event references for temporal anchoring, or gestural cues for spatial anchoring to clarify object references and positions. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce Strefer, a synthetic instruction data generation framework designed to equip Video LLMs with spatiotemporal referring and reasoning capabilities. Strefer produces diverse instruction-tuning data using a data engine that pseudo-annotates temporally dense, fine-grained video metadata, capturing rich spatial and temporal information in a structured manner, including subjects, objects, their locations as masklets, and their action descriptions and timelines. Our approach enhances the ability of Video LLMs to interpret spatial and temporal references, fostering more versatile, space-time-aware reasoning essential for real-world AI companions. Without using proprietary models, costly human annotation, or the need to annotate large volumes of new videos, experimental evaluations show that models trained with data produced by Strefer outperform baselines on tasks requiring spatial and temporal disambiguation. Additionally, these models exhibit enhanced space-time-aware reasoning, establishing a new foundation for perceptually grounded, instruction-tuned Video LLMs.

We introduce Cosmos-Transfer, a conditional world generation model that can generate world simulations based on multiple spatial control inputs of various modalities such as segmentation, depth, and edge. In the design, the spatial conditional scheme is adaptive and customizable. It allows weighting different conditional inputs differently at different spatial locations. This enables highly controllable world generation and finds use in various world-to-world transfer use cases, including Sim2Real. We conduct extensive evaluations to analyze the proposed model and demonstrate its applications for Physical AI, including robotics Sim2Real and autonomous vehicle data enrichment. We further demonstrate an inference scaling strategy to achieve real-time world generation with an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack. To help accelerate research development in the field, we open-source our models and code at https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-transfer1.

The improvement of web agents on current benchmarks raises the question: Do today's agents perform just as well when the web changes? We introduce TimeWarp, a benchmark that emulates the evolving web using containerized environments that vary in UI, design, and layout. TimeWarp consists of three web environments, each with six UI versions spanning different eras of the internet, paired with a set of complex, realistic tasks requiring different forms of web navigation. Our experiments reveal web agents' vulnerability to changes and the limitations of behavior cloning (BC) on single-version trajectories. To address this, we propose TimeTraj, a simple yet effective algorithm that uses plan distillation to collect trajectories across multiple versions. By training agents on teacher rollouts using our BC-variant, we achieve substantial performance gains: 20.4%rightarrow37.7% for Qwen-3 4B and 0%rightarrow27.0% for Llama-3.1 8B models. We hope our work helps researchers study generalization across web designs and unlock a new paradigm for collecting plans rather than trajectories, thereby improving the robustness of web agents.

AI agents -- systems that combine foundation models with reasoning, planning, memory, and tool use -- are rapidly becoming a practical interface between natural-language intent and real-world computation. This survey synthesizes the emerging landscape of AI agent architectures across: (i) deliberation and reasoning (e.g., chain-of-thought-style decomposition, self-reflection and verification, and constraint-aware decision making), (ii) planning and control (from reactive policies to hierarchical and multi-step planners), and (iii) tool calling and environment interaction (retrieval, code execution, APIs, and multimodal perception). We organize prior work into a unified taxonomy spanning agent components (policy/LLM core, memory, world models, planners, tool routers, and critics), orchestration patterns (single-agent vs.\ multi-agent; centralized vs.\ decentralized coordination), and deployment settings (offline analysis vs.\ online interactive assistance; safety-critical vs.\ open-ended tasks). We discuss key design trade-offs -- latency vs.\ accuracy, autonomy vs.\ controllability, and capability vs.\ reliability -- and highlight how evaluation is complicated by non-determinism, long-horizon credit assignment, tool and environment variability, and hidden costs such as retries and context growth. Finally, we summarize measurement and benchmarking practices (task suites, human preference and utility metrics, success under constraints, robustness and security) and identify open challenges including verification and guardrails for tool actions, scalable memory and context management, interpretability of agent decisions, and reproducible evaluation under realistic workloads.

LWM-Temporal is a new member of the Large Wireless Models (LWM) family that targets the spatiotemporal nature of wireless channels. Designed as a task-agnostic foundation model, LWM-Temporal learns universal channel embeddings that capture mobility-induced evolution and are reusable across various downstream tasks. To achieve this objective, LWM-Temporal operates in the angle-delay-time domain and introduces Sparse Spatio-Temporal Attention (SSTA), a propagation-aligned attention mechanism that restricts interactions to physically plausible neighborhoods, reducing attention complexity by an order of magnitude while preserving geometry-consistent dependencies. LWM-Temporal is pretrained in a self-supervised manner using a physics-informed masking curriculum that emulates realistic occlusions, pilot sparsity, and measurement impairments. Experimental results on channel prediction across multiple mobility regimes show consistent improvements over strong baselines, particularly under long horizons and limited fine-tuning data, highlighting the importance of geometry-aware architectures and geometry-consistent pretraining for learning transferable spatiotemporal wireless representations.

As AI systems enter into a growing number of societal domains, these systems increasingly shape and are shaped by user preferences, opinions, and behaviors. However, the design of AI systems rarely accounts for how AI and users shape one another. In this position paper, we argue for the development of formal interaction models which mathematically specify how AI and users shape one another. Formal interaction models can be leveraged to (1) specify interactions for implementation, (2) monitor interactions through empirical analysis, (3) anticipate societal impacts via counterfactual analysis, and (4) control societal impacts via interventions. The design space of formal interaction models is vast, and model design requires careful consideration of factors such as style, granularity, mathematical complexity, and measurability. Using content recommender systems as a case study, we critically examine the nascent literature of formal interaction models with respect to these use-cases and design axes. More broadly, we call for the community to leverage formal interaction models when designing, evaluating, or auditing any AI system which interacts with users.

In this paper, we present DesignDiffusion, a simple yet effective framework for the novel task of synthesizing design images from textual descriptions. A primary challenge lies in generating accurate and style-consistent textual and visual content. Existing works in a related task of visual text generation often focus on generating text within given specific regions, which limits the creativity of generation models, resulting in style or color inconsistencies between textual and visual elements if applied to design image generation. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end, one-stage diffusion-based framework that avoids intricate components like position and layout modeling. Specifically, the proposed framework directly synthesizes textual and visual design elements from user prompts. It utilizes a distinctive character embedding derived from the visual text to enhance the input prompt, along with a character localization loss for enhanced supervision during text generation. Furthermore, we employ a self-play Direct Preference Optimization fine-tuning strategy to improve the quality and accuracy of the synthesized visual text. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DesignDiffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance in design image generation.

Visual communication, dating back to prehistoric cave paintings, is the use of visual elements to convey ideas and information. In today's visually saturated world, effective design demands an understanding of graphic design principles, visual storytelling, human psychology, and the ability to distill complex information into clear visuals. This dissertation explores how recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged to automate the creation of effective visual communication designs. Although generative models have made great progress in generating images from text, they still struggle to simplify complex ideas into clear, abstract visuals and are constrained by pixel-based outputs, which lack flexibility for many design tasks. To address these challenges, we constrain the models' operational space and introduce task-specific regularizations. We explore various aspects of visual communication, namely, sketches and visual abstraction, typography, animation, and visual inspiration.

Generative models have shown great promise in generating 3D geometric systems, which is a fundamental problem in many natural science domains such as molecule and protein design. However, existing approaches only operate on static structures, neglecting the fact that physical systems are always dynamic in nature. In this work, we propose geometric trajectory diffusion models (GeoTDM), the first diffusion model for modeling the temporal distribution of 3D geometric trajectories. Modeling such distribution is challenging as it requires capturing both the complex spatial interactions with physical symmetries and temporal correspondence encapsulated in the dynamics. We theoretically justify that diffusion models with equivariant temporal kernels can lead to density with desired symmetry, and develop a novel transition kernel leveraging SE(3)-equivariant spatial convolution and temporal attention. Furthermore, to induce an expressive trajectory distribution for conditional generation, we introduce a generalized learnable geometric prior into the forward diffusion process to enhance temporal conditioning. We conduct extensive experiments on both unconditional and conditional generation in various scenarios, including physical simulation, molecular dynamics, and pedestrian motion. Empirical results on a wide suite of metrics demonstrate that GeoTDM can generate realistic geometric trajectories with significantly higher quality.

Graphic design, which has been evolving since the 15th century, plays a crucial role in advertising. The creation of high-quality designs demands design-oriented planning, reasoning, and layer-wise generation. Unlike the recent CanvaGPT, which integrates GPT-4 with existing design templates to build a custom GPT, this paper introduces the COLE system - a hierarchical generation framework designed to comprehensively address these challenges. This COLE system can transform a vague intention prompt into a high-quality multi-layered graphic design, while also supporting flexible editing based on user input. Examples of such input might include directives like ``design a poster for Hisaishi's concert.'' The key insight is to dissect the complex task of text-to-design generation into a hierarchy of simpler sub-tasks, each addressed by specialized models working collaboratively. The results from these models are then consolidated to produce a cohesive final output. Our hierarchical task decomposition can streamline the complex process and significantly enhance generation reliability. Our COLE system comprises multiple fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs), Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), and Diffusion Models (DMs), each specifically tailored for design-aware layer-wise captioning, layout planning, reasoning, and the task of generating images and text. Furthermore, we construct the DESIGNINTENTION benchmark to demonstrate the superiority of our COLE system over existing methods in generating high-quality graphic designs from user intent. Last, we present a Canva-like multi-layered image editing tool to support flexible editing of the generated multi-layered graphic design images. We perceive our COLE system as an important step towards addressing more complex and multi-layered graphic design generation tasks in the future.

Recent technological advances, especially in the field of machine learning, provide astonishing progress on the road towards artificial general intelligence. However, tasks in current real-world business applications cannot yet be solved by machines alone. We, therefore, identify the need for developing socio-technological ensembles of humans and machines. Such systems possess the ability to accomplish complex goals by combining human and artificial intelligence to collectively achieve superior results and continuously improve by learning from each other. Thus, the need for structured design knowledge for those systems arises. Following a taxonomy development method, this article provides three main contributions: First, we present a structured overview of interdisciplinary research on the role of humans in the machine learning pipeline. Second, we envision hybrid intelligence systems and conceptualize the relevant dimensions for system design for the first time. Finally, we offer useful guidance for system developers during the implementation of such applications.

The current advances in generative AI for learning large neural network models with the capability to produce essays, images, music and even 3D assets from text prompts create opportunities for a manifold of disciplines. In the present paper, we study the potential of deep text-to-3D models in the engineering domain, with focus on the chances and challenges when integrating and interacting with 3D assets in computational simulation-based design optimization. In contrast to traditional design optimization of 3D geometries that often searches for the optimum designs using numerical representations, such as B-Spline surface or deformation parameters in vehicle aerodynamic optimization, natural language challenges the optimization framework by requiring a different interpretation of variation operators while at the same time may ease and motivate the human user interaction. Here, we propose and realize a fully automated evolutionary design optimization framework using Shap-E, a recently published text-to-3D asset network by OpenAI, in the context of aerodynamic vehicle optimization. For representing text prompts in the evolutionary optimization, we evaluate (a) a bag-of-words approach based on prompt templates and Wordnet samples, and (b) a tokenisation approach based on prompt templates and the byte pair encoding method from GPT4. Our main findings from the optimizations indicate that, first, it is important to ensure that the designs generated from prompts are within the object class of application, i.e. diverse and novel designs need to be realistic, and, second, that more research is required to develop methods where the strength of text prompt variations and the resulting variations of the 3D designs share causal relations to some degree to improve the optimization.

Engineering Design is undergoing a transformative shift with the advent of AI, marking a new era in how we approach product, system, and service planning. Large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in enabling this shift. Yet, with text as their only input modality, they cannot leverage the large body of visual artifacts that engineers have used for centuries and are accustomed to. This gap is addressed with the release of multimodal vision language models, such as GPT-4V, enabling AI to impact many more types of tasks. In light of these advancements, this paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4V, a vision language model, across a wide spectrum of engineering design tasks, categorized into four main areas: Conceptual Design, System-Level and Detailed Design, Manufacturing and Inspection, and Engineering Education Tasks. Our study assesses GPT-4V's capabilities in design tasks such as sketch similarity analysis, concept selection using Pugh Charts, material selection, engineering drawing analysis, CAD generation, topology optimization, design for additive and subtractive manufacturing, spatial reasoning challenges, and textbook problems. Through this structured evaluation, we not only explore GPT-4V's proficiency in handling complex design and manufacturing challenges but also identify its limitations in complex engineering design applications. Our research establishes a foundation for future assessments of vision language models, emphasizing their immense potential for innovating and enhancing the engineering design and manufacturing landscape. It also contributes a set of benchmark testing datasets, with more than 1000 queries, for ongoing advancements and applications in this field.

The proliferation of applications using artificial intelligence (AI) systems has led to a growing number of users interacting with these systems through sophisticated interfaces. Human-computer interaction research has long shown that interfaces shape both user behavior and user perception of technical capabilities and risks. Yet, practitioners and researchers evaluating the social and ethical risks of AI systems tend to overlook the impact of anthropomorphic, deceptive, and immersive interfaces on human-AI interactions. Here, we argue that design features of interfaces with adaptive AI systems can have cascading impacts, driven by feedback loops, which extend beyond those previously considered. We first conduct a scoping review of AI interface designs and their negative impact to extract salient themes of potentially harmful design patterns in AI interfaces. Then, we propose Design-Enhanced Control of AI systems (DECAI), a conceptual model to structure and facilitate impact assessments of AI interface designs. DECAI draws on principles from control systems theory -- a theory for the analysis and design of dynamic physical systems -- to dissect the role of the interface in human-AI systems. Through two case studies on recommendation systems and conversational language model systems, we show how DECAI can be used to evaluate AI interface designs.

User interface (UI) design is an iterative process in which designers progressively refine their work with design software such as Figma or Sketch. Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) with tool invocation suggest these models can operate design software to edit a UI design through iteration. Understanding and enhancing this capacity is important, as it highlights VLMs' potential to collaborate with designers within conventional software. However, as no existing benchmark evaluates tool-based design performance, the capacity remains unknown. To address this, we introduce CANVAS, a benchmark for VLMs on tool-based user interface design. Our benchmark contains 598 tool-based design tasks paired with ground-truth references sampled from 3.3K mobile UI designs across 30 function-based categories (e.g., onboarding, messaging). In each task, a VLM updates the design step-by-step through context-based tool invocations (e.g., create a rectangle as a button background), linked to design software. Specifically, CANVAS incorporates two task types: (i) design replication evaluates the ability to reproduce a whole UI screen; (ii) design modification evaluates the ability to modify a specific part of an existing screen. Results suggest that leading models exhibit more strategic tool invocations, improving design quality. Furthermore, we identify common error patterns models exhibit, guiding future work in enhancing tool-based design capabilities.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has streamlined frontend interface creation through tools like Vercel's V0, yet surfaced challenges in design quality (e.g., accessibility, and usability). Current solutions, often limited by their focus, generalisability, or data dependency, fall short in addressing these complexities. Moreover, none of them examine the quality of LLM-generated UI design. In this work, we introduce DesignRepair, a novel dual-stream design guideline-aware system to examine and repair the UI design quality issues from both code aspect and rendered page aspect. We utilised the mature and popular Material Design as our knowledge base to guide this process. Specifically, we first constructed a comprehensive knowledge base encoding Google's Material Design principles into low-level component knowledge base and high-level system design knowledge base. After that, DesignRepair employs a LLM for the extraction of key components and utilizes the Playwright tool for precise page analysis, aligning these with the established knowledge bases. Finally, we integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation with state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 to holistically refine and repair frontend code through a strategic divide and conquer approach. Our extensive evaluations validated the efficacy and utility of our approach, demonstrating significant enhancements in adherence to design guidelines, accessibility, and user experience metrics.

Creative workflows for generating graphical documents involve complex inter-related tasks, such as aligning elements, choosing appropriate fonts, or employing aesthetically harmonious colors. In this work, we attempt at building a holistic model that can jointly solve many different design tasks. Our model, which we denote by FlexDM, treats vector graphic documents as a set of multi-modal elements, and learns to predict masked fields such as element type, position, styling attributes, image, or text, using a unified architecture. Through the use of explicit multi-task learning and in-domain pre-training, our model can better capture the multi-modal relationships among the different document fields. Experimental results corroborate that our single FlexDM is able to successfully solve a multitude of different design tasks, while achieving performance that is competitive with task-specific and costly baselines.

Video diffusion models have recently shown promise for world modeling through autoregressive frame prediction conditioned on actions. However, they struggle to maintain long-term memory due to the high computational cost associated with processing extended sequences in attention layers. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel architecture leveraging state-space models (SSMs) to extend temporal memory without compromising computational efficiency. Unlike previous approaches that retrofit SSMs for non-causal vision tasks, our method fully exploits the inherent advantages of SSMs in causal sequence modeling. Central to our design is a block-wise SSM scanning scheme, which strategically trades off spatial consistency for extended temporal memory, combined with dense local attention to ensure coherence between consecutive frames. We evaluate the long-term memory capabilities of our model through spatial retrieval and reasoning tasks over extended horizons. Experiments on Memory Maze and Minecraft datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses baselines in preserving long-range memory, while maintaining practical inference speeds suitable for interactive applications.

Community consultations are integral to urban planning processes intended to incorporate diverse stakeholder perspectives. However, limited resources, visual and spoken language barriers, and uneven power dynamics frequently constrain inclusive decision-making. This paper examines how generative text-to-image methods, specifically Stable Diffusion XL integrated into a custom platform (WeDesign), may support equitable consultations. A half-day workshop in Montreal involved five focus groups, each consisting of architects, urban designers, AI specialists, and residents from varied demographic groups. Additional data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with six urban planning professionals. Participants indicated that immediate visual outputs facilitated creativity and dialogue, yet noted issues in visualizing specific needs of marginalized groups, such as participants with reduced mobility, accurately depicting local architectural elements, and accommodating bilingual prompts. Participants recommended the development of an open-source platform incorporating in-painting tools, multilingual support, image voting functionalities, and preference indicators. The results indicate that generative AI can broaden participation and enable iterative interactions but requires structured facilitation approaches. The findings contribute to discussions on generative AI's role and limitations in participatory urban design.

Material selection plays a pivotal role in many industries, from manufacturing to construction. Material selection is usually carried out after several cycles of conceptual design, during which designers iteratively refine the design solution and the intended manufacturing approach. In design research, material selection is typically treated as an optimization problem with a single correct answer. Moreover, it is also often restricted to specific types of objects or design functions, which can make the selection process computationally expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we introduce MSEval, a novel dataset which is comprised of expert material evaluations across a variety of design briefs and criteria. This data is designed to serve as a benchmark to facilitate the evaluation and modification of machine learning models in the context of material selection for conceptual design.

Graphic designs are an effective medium for visual communication. They range from greeting cards to corporate flyers and beyond. Off-late, machine learning techniques are able to generate such designs, which accelerates the rate of content production. An automated way of evaluating their quality becomes critical. Towards this end, we introduce Design-o-meter, a data-driven methodology to quantify the goodness of graphic designs. Further, our approach can suggest modifications to these designs to improve its visual appeal. To the best of our knowledge, Design-o-meter is the first approach that scores and refines designs in a unified framework despite the inherent subjectivity and ambiguity of the setting. Our exhaustive quantitative and qualitative analysis of our approach against baselines adapted for the task (including recent Multimodal LLM-based approaches) brings out the efficacy of our methodology. We hope our work will usher more interest in this important and pragmatic problem setting.

Spatiotemporal reasoning plays a key role in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), their capacity to reason about complex spatiotemporal signals remains underexplored. This paper proposes a hierarchical SpatioTemporal reAsoning benchmaRK, STARK, to systematically evaluate LLMs across three levels of reasoning complexity: state estimation (e.g., predicting field variables, localizing and tracking events in space and time), spatiotemporal reasoning over states (e.g., inferring spatial-temporal relationships), and world-knowledge-aware reasoning that integrates contextual and domain knowledge (e.g., intent prediction, landmark-aware navigation). We curate 26 distinct spatiotemporal tasks with diverse sensor modalities, comprising 14,552 challenges where models answer directly or by Python Code Interpreter. Evaluating 3 LRMs and 8 LLMs, we find LLMs achieve limited success in tasks requiring geometric reasoning (e.g., multilateration or triangulation), particularly as complexity increases. Surprisingly, LRMs show robust performance across tasks with various levels of difficulty, often competing or surpassing traditional first-principle-based methods. Our results show that in reasoning tasks requiring world knowledge, the performance gap between LLMs and LRMs narrows, with some LLMs even surpassing LRMs. However, the LRM o3 model continues to achieve leading performance across all evaluated tasks, a result attributed primarily to the larger size of the reasoning models. STARK motivates future innovations in model architectures and reasoning paradigms for intelligent CPS by providing a structured framework to identify limitations in the spatiotemporal reasoning of LLMs and LRMs.

Recent works exploring deep learning application to dynamical systems modeling have demonstrated that embedding physical priors into neural networks can yield more effective, physically-realistic, and data-efficient models. However, in the absence of complete prior knowledge of a dynamical system's physical characteristics, determining the optimal structure and optimization strategy for these models can be difficult. In this work, we explore methods for discovering neural state space dynamics models for system identification. Starting with a design space of block-oriented state space models and structured linear maps with strong physical priors, we encode these components into a model genome alongside network structure, penalty constraints, and optimization hyperparameters. Demonstrating the overall utility of the design space, we employ an asynchronous genetic search algorithm that alternates between model selection and optimization and obtains accurate physically consistent models of three physical systems: an aerodynamics body, a continuous stirred tank reactor, and a two tank interacting system.

Temporal knowledge graphs represent temporal facts (s,p,o,tau) relating a subject s and an object o via a relation label p at time tau, where tau could be a time point or time interval. Temporal knowledge graphs may exhibit static temporal patterns at distinct points in time and dynamic temporal patterns between different timestamps. In order to learn a rich set of static and dynamic temporal patterns and apply them for inference, several embedding approaches have been suggested in the literature. However, as most of them resort to single underlying embedding spaces, their capability to model all kinds of temporal patterns was severely limited by having to adhere to the geometric property of their one embedding space. We lift this limitation by an embedding approach that maps temporal facts into a product space of several heterogeneous geometric subspaces with distinct geometric properties, i.e.\ Complex, Dual, and Split-complex spaces. In addition, we propose a temporal-geometric attention mechanism to integrate information from different geometric subspaces conveniently according to the captured relational and temporal information. Experimental results on standard temporal benchmark datasets favorably evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art models.

In this paper we introduce the Temporo-Spatial Vision Transformer (TSViT), a fully-attentional model for general Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) processing based on the Vision Transformer (ViT). TSViT splits a SITS record into non-overlapping patches in space and time which are tokenized and subsequently processed by a factorized temporo-spatial encoder. We argue, that in contrast to natural images, a temporal-then-spatial factorization is more intuitive for SITS processing and present experimental evidence for this claim. Additionally, we enhance the model's discriminative power by introducing two novel mechanisms for acquisition-time-specific temporal positional encodings and multiple learnable class tokens. The effect of all novel design choices is evaluated through an extensive ablation study. Our proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous approaches by a significant margin in three publicly available SITS semantic segmentation and classification datasets. All model, training and evaluation codes are made publicly available to facilitate further research.

Generative AI is known for its tendency to homogenize, often reproducing dominant style conventions found in training data. However, it remains unclear how these homogenizing effects extend to complex structural tasks like web design. As lay creators increasingly turn to LLMs to 'vibe-code' websites -- prompting for aesthetic and functional goals rather than writing code -- they may inadvertently narrow the diversity of their designs, and limit creative expression throughout the internet. In this paper, we interrogate the possibility of design homogenization in web vibe coding. We first characterize the vibe coding lifecycle, pinpointing stages where homogenization risks may arise. We then conduct a sociotechnical risk analysis unpacking the potential harms of web vibe coding and their interaction with design homogenization. We identify that the push for frictionless generation can exacerbate homogenization and its harms. Finally, we propose a mitigation framework centered on the idea of productive friction. Through case studies at the micro, meso, and macro levels, we show how centering productive friction can empower creators to challenge default outputs and preserve diverse expression in AI-mediated web design.

Multi-modal models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. Nevertheless, they continue to exhibit notable limitations in spatial understanding and reasoning, which are fundamental capabilities to achieving artificial general intelligence. With the recent release of GPT-5, allegedly the most powerful AI model to date, it is timely to examine where the leading models stand on the path toward spatial intelligence. First, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy of spatial tasks that unifies existing benchmarks and discuss the challenges in ensuring fair evaluation. We then evaluate state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models on eight key benchmarks, at a cost exceeding one billion total tokens. Our empirical study reveals that (1) GPT-5 demonstrates unprecedented strength in spatial intelligence, yet (2) still falls short of human performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. Moreover, we (3) identify the more challenging spatial intelligence problems for multi-modal models, and (4) proprietary models do not exhibit a decisive advantage when facing the most difficult problems. In addition, we conduct a qualitative evaluation across a diverse set of scenarios that are intuitive for humans yet fail even the most advanced multi-modal models.

The rapid advancement of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for 2D images and videos has motivated extending these models to understand 3D scenes, aiming for human-like visual-spatial intelligence. Nevertheless, achieving deep spatial understanding comparable to human capabilities poses significant challenges in model encoding and data acquisition. Existing methods frequently depend on external depth sensors for geometry capture or utilize off-the-shelf algorithms for pre-constructing 3D maps, thereby limiting their scalability, especially with prevalent monocular video inputs and for time-sensitive applications. In this work, we introduce VLM-3R, a unified framework for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that incorporates 3D Reconstructive instruction tuning. VLM-3R processes monocular video frames by employing a geometry encoder to derive implicit 3D tokens that represent spatial understanding. Leveraging our Spatial-Visual-View Fusion and over 200K curated 3D reconstructive instruction tuning question-answer (QA) pairs, VLM-3R effectively aligns real-world spatial context with language instructions. This enables monocular 3D spatial assistance and embodied reasoning. To facilitate the evaluation of temporal reasoning, we introduce the Vision-Spatial-Temporal Intelligence benchmark, featuring over 138.6K QA pairs across five distinct tasks focused on evolving spatial relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model, VLM-3R, not only facilitates robust visual-spatial reasoning but also enables the understanding of temporal 3D context changes, excelling in both accuracy and scalability.

Urban traffic flow is governed by the complex, nonlinear interaction between land use configuration and spatiotemporally heterogeneous mobility demand. Conventional global regression and time-series models cannot simultaneously capture these multi-scale dynamics across multiple travel modes. This study proposes a GeoAI Hybrid analytical framework that sequentially integrates Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR), Random Forest (RF), and Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCN) to model the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of traffic flow patterns and their interaction with land use across three mobility modes: motor vehicle, public transit, and active transport. Applying the framework to an empirically calibrated dataset of 350 traffic analysis zones across six cities spanning two contrasting urban morphologies, four key findings emerge: (i) the GeoAI Hybrid achieves a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.119 and an R^2 of 0.891, outperforming all benchmarks by 23-62%; (ii) SHAP analysis identifies land use mix as the strongest predictor for motor vehicle flows and transit stop density as the strongest predictor for public transit; (iii) DBSCAN clustering identifies five functionally distinct urban traffic typologies with a silhouette score of 0.71, and GeoAI Hybrid residuals exhibit Moran's I=0.218 (p<0.001), a 72% reduction relative to OLS baselines; and (iv) cross-city transfer experiments reveal moderate within-cluster transferability (R^2>=0.78) and limited cross-cluster generalisability, underscoring the primacy of urban morphological context. The framework offers planners and transportation engineers an interpretable, scalable toolkit for evidence-based multimodal mobility management and land use policy design.

Recent successes in autoregressive (AR) generation models, such as the GPT series in natural language processing, have motivated efforts to replicate this success in visual tasks. Some works attempt to extend this approach to autonomous driving by building video-based world models capable of generating realistic future video sequences and predicting ego states. However, prior works tend to produce unsatisfactory results, as the classic GPT framework is designed to handle 1D contextual information, such as text, and lacks the inherent ability to model the spatial and temporal dynamics essential for video generation. In this paper, we present DrivingWorld, a GPT-style world model for autonomous driving, featuring several spatial-temporal fusion mechanisms. This design enables effective modeling of both spatial and temporal dynamics, facilitating high-fidelity, long-duration video generation. Specifically, we propose a next-state prediction strategy to model temporal coherence between consecutive frames and apply a next-token prediction strategy to capture spatial information within each frame. To further enhance generalization ability, we propose a novel masking strategy and reweighting strategy for token prediction to mitigate long-term drifting issues and enable precise control. Our work demonstrates the ability to produce high-fidelity and consistent video clips of over 40 seconds in duration, which is over 2 times longer than state-of-the-art driving world models. Experiments show that, in contrast to prior works, our method achieves superior visual quality and significantly more accurate controllable future video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/DrivingWorld.

In the field of graphic design, automating the integration of design elements into a cohesive multi-layered artwork not only boosts productivity but also paves the way for the democratization of graphic design. One existing practice is Graphic Layout Generation (GLG), which aims to layout sequential design elements. It has been constrained by the necessity for a predefined correct sequence of layers, thus limiting creative potential and increasing user workload. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Layout Generation (HLG) as a more flexible and pragmatic setup, which creates graphic composition from unordered sets of design elements. To tackle the HLG task, we introduce Graphist, the first layout generation model based on large multimodal models. Graphist efficiently reframes the HLG as a sequence generation problem, utilizing RGB-A images as input, outputs a JSON draft protocol, indicating the coordinates, size, and order of each element. We develop new evaluation metrics for HLG. Graphist outperforms prior arts and establishes a strong baseline for this field. Project homepage: https://github.com/graphic-design-ai/graphist

Designing high-quality presentation slides can be challenging for non-experts due to the complexity involved in navigating various design choices. Numerous automated tools can suggest layouts and color schemes, yet often lack the ability to refine their own output, which is a key aspect in real-world workflows. We propose DesignLab, which separates the design process into two roles, the design reviewer, who identifies design-related issues, and the design contributor who corrects them. This decomposition enables an iterative loop where the reviewer continuously detects issues and the contributor corrects them, allowing a draft to be further polished with each iteration, reaching qualities that were unattainable. We fine-tune large language models for these roles and simulate intermediate drafts by introducing controlled perturbations, enabling the design reviewer learn design errors and the contributor learn how to fix them. Our experiments show that DesignLab outperforms existing design-generation methods, including a commercial tool, by embracing the iterative nature of designing which can result in polished, professional slides.

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains. However, designing high-performing agentic systems remains challenging. Existing agent search methods suffer from three major limitations: (1) an emphasis on optimizing agentic workflows while under-utilizing proven human-designed components such as memory, planning, and tool use; (2) high evaluation costs, as each newly generated agent must be fully evaluated on benchmarks; and (3) inefficient search in large search space. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive framework to address these challenges. First, We propose a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components, enabling richer agentic system designs. Building on this structured design space, we introduce a predictive value model that estimates agent performance given agentic system and task description, allowing for efficient, low-cost evaluation during the search process. Finally, we present a hierarchical Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) strategy informed by uncertainty to guide the search. Experiments on seven benchmarks, covering embodied, math, web, tool, and game, show that our method achieves an average performance gain of 8.34\% over state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits faster search progress with steeper improvement trajectories. Code repo is available at https://github.com/Ericccc02/AgentSwift.

Creating high-fidelity 3D models of indoor environments is essential for applications in design, virtual reality, and robotics. However, manual 3D modeling remains time-consuming and labor-intensive. While recent advances in generative AI have enabled automated scene synthesis, existing methods often face challenges in balancing visual quality, diversity, semantic consistency, and user control. A major bottleneck is the lack of a large-scale, high-quality dataset tailored to this task. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive synthetic dataset, featuring 12,328 structured annotated scenes with 57,440 rooms, and 4.7M photorealistic 2D renderings. Leveraging this dataset, we present SpatialGen, a novel multi-view multi-modal diffusion model that generates realistic and semantically consistent 3D indoor scenes. Given a 3D layout and a reference image (derived from a text prompt), our model synthesizes appearance (color image), geometry (scene coordinate map), and semantic (semantic segmentation map) from arbitrary viewpoints, while preserving spatial consistency across modalities. SpatialGen consistently generates superior results to previous methods in our experiments. We are open-sourcing our data and models to empower the community and advance the field of indoor scene understanding and generation.

Spatial computing is a technological advancement that facilitates the seamless integration of devices into the physical environment, resulting in a more natural and intuitive digital world user experience. Spatial computing has the potential to become a significant advancement in the field of computing. From GPS and location-based services to healthcare, spatial computing technologies have influenced and improved our interactions with the digital world. The use of spatial computing in creating interactive digital environments has become increasingly popular and effective. This is explained by its increasing significance among researchers and industrial organisations, which motivated us to conduct this review. This review provides a detailed overview of spatial computing, including its enabling technologies and its impact on various applications. Projects related to spatial computing are also discussed. In this review, we also explored the potential challenges and limitations of spatial computing. Furthermore, we discuss potential solutions and future directions. Overall, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of spatial computing, its enabling technologies, their impact on various applications, emerging challenges, and potential solutions.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is crucial in prototyping 3D objects through geometric instructions (i.e., CAD programs). In practical design workflows, designers often engage in time-consuming reviews and refinements of these prototypes by comparing them with reference images. To bridge this gap, we introduce the CAD review task to automatically detect and correct potential errors, ensuring consistency between the constructed 3D objects and reference images. However, recent advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle to recognize multiple geometric components and perform spatial geometric operations within the CAD program, leading to inaccurate reviews. In this paper, we propose the CAD program repairer (ReCAD) framework to effectively detect program errors and provide helpful feedback on error correction. Additionally, we create a dataset, CADReview, consisting of over 20K program-image pairs, with diverse errors for the CAD review task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ReCAD significantly outperforms existing MLLMs, which shows great potential in design applications.

Inspired by cognitive theories, we introduce AnyHome, a framework that translates any text into well-structured and textured indoor scenes at a house-scale. By prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) with designed templates, our approach converts provided textual narratives into amodal structured representations. These representations guarantee consistent and realistic spatial layouts by directing the synthesis of a geometry mesh within defined constraints. A Score Distillation Sampling process is then employed to refine the geometry, followed by an egocentric inpainting process that adds lifelike textures to it. AnyHome stands out with its editability, customizability, diversity, and realism. The structured representations for scenes allow for extensive editing at varying levels of granularity. Capable of interpreting texts ranging from simple labels to detailed narratives, AnyHome generates detailed geometries and textures that outperform existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative measures.

Spatio-temporal consistency is a critical research topic in video generation. A qualified generated video segment must ensure plot plausibility and coherence while maintaining visual consistency of objects and scenes across varying viewpoints. Prior research, especially in open-source projects, primarily focuses on either temporal or spatial consistency, or their basic combination, such as appending a description of a camera movement after a prompt without constraining the outcomes of this movement. However, camera movement may introduce new objects to the scene or eliminate existing ones, thereby overlaying and affecting the preceding narrative. Especially in videos with numerous camera movements, the interplay between multiple plots becomes increasingly complex. This paper introduces and examines integral spatio-temporal consistency, considering the synergy between plot progression and camera techniques, and the long-term impact of prior content on subsequent generation. Our research encompasses dataset construction through to the development of the model. Initially, we constructed a DropletVideo-10M dataset, which comprises 10 million videos featuring dynamic camera motion and object actions. Each video is annotated with an average caption of 206 words, detailing various camera movements and plot developments. Following this, we developed and trained the DropletVideo model, which excels in preserving spatio-temporal coherence during video generation. The DropletVideo dataset and model are accessible at https://dropletx.github.io.

The convergence of artificial intelligence and materials science presents a transformative opportunity, but achieving true acceleration in discovery requires moving beyond task-isolated, fine-tuned models toward agentic systems that plan, act, and learn across the full discovery loop. This survey advances a unique pipeline-centric view that spans from corpus curation and pretraining, through domain adaptation and instruction tuning, to goal-conditioned agents interfacing with simulation and experimental platforms. Unlike prior reviews, we treat the entire process as an end-to-end system to be optimized for tangible discovery outcomes rather than proxy benchmarks. This perspective allows us to trace how upstream design choices-such as data curation and training objectives-can be aligned with downstream experimental success through effective credit assignment. To bridge communities and establish a shared frame of reference, we first present an integrated lens that aligns terminology, evaluation, and workflow stages across AI and materials science. We then analyze the field through two focused lenses: From the AI perspective, the survey details LLM strengths in pattern recognition, predictive analytics, and natural language processing for literature mining, materials characterization, and property prediction; from the materials science perspective, it highlights applications in materials design, process optimization, and the acceleration of computational workflows via integration with external tools (e.g., DFT, robotic labs). Finally, we contrast passive, reactive approaches with agentic design, cataloging current contributions while motivating systems that pursue long-horizon goals with autonomy, memory, and tool use. This survey charts a practical roadmap towards autonomous, safety-aware LLM agents aimed at discovering novel and useful materials.

The ability to reason about spatial dynamics is a cornerstone of intelligence, yet current research overlooks the human intent behind spatial changes. To address these limitations, we introduce Teleo-Spatial Intelligence (TSI), a new paradigm that unifies two critical pillars: Physical-Dynamic Reasoning--understanding the physical principles of object interactions--and Intent-Driven Reasoning--inferring the human goals behind these actions. To catalyze research in TSI, we present EscherVerse, consisting of a large-scale, open-world benchmark (Escher-Bench), a dataset (Escher-35k), and models (Escher series). Derived from real-world videos, EscherVerse moves beyond constrained settings to explicitly evaluate an agent's ability to reason about object permanence, state transitions, and trajectory prediction in dynamic, human-centric scenarios. Crucially, it is the first benchmark to systematically assess Intent-Driven Reasoning, challenging models to connect physical events to their underlying human purposes. Our work, including a novel data curation pipeline, provides a foundational resource to advance spatial intelligence from passive scene description toward a holistic, purpose-driven understanding of the world.

Layering information spaces is a promising strategy to design intuitive and engaging interactive experiences. Although multi-layer displays enable promising interaction techniques through limited depth perception - achieved via slight separation between layers - it remains unclear how to fully design experiences that leverage the unique affordances of layered information. To address this, we introduce Proscenium, a dual-layer, large transparent display workspace setup with an adjustable separation between the layers. We demonstrate our preliminary design space focusing on how rendered information can be transitioned and linked across displays, and showcase 14 speculative experience prototypes across six categories.

Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is a powerful specification language for describing complex temporal behaviors of continuous signals, making it well-suited for high-level robotic task descriptions. However, generating executable plans for STL tasks is challenging, as it requires consideration of the coupling between the task specification and the system dynamics. Existing approaches either follow a model-based setting that explicitly requires knowledge of the system dynamics or adopt a task-oriented data-driven approach to learn plans for specific tasks. In this work, we address the problem of generating executable STL plans for systems with unknown dynamics. We propose a hierarchical planning framework that enables zero-shot generalization to new STL tasks by leveraging only task-agnostic trajectory data during offline training. The framework consists of three key components: (i) decomposing the STL specification into several progresses and time constraints, (ii) searching for timed waypoints that satisfy all progresses under time constraints, and (iii) generating trajectory segments using a pre-trained diffusion model and stitching them into complete trajectories. We formally prove that our method guarantees STL satisfaction, and simulation results demonstrate its effectiveness in generating dynamically feasible trajectories across diverse long-horizon STL tasks.

With the rapid development of spatial audio technologies today, applications in AR, VR, and other scenarios have garnered extensive attention. Unlike traditional mono sound, spatial audio offers a more realistic and immersive auditory experience. Despite notable progress in the field, there remains a lack of comprehensive surveys that systematically organize and analyze these methods and their underlying technologies. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of spatial audio and systematically review recent literature in the area. To address this, we chronologically outlining existing work related to spatial audio and categorize these studies based on input-output representations, as well as generation and understanding tasks, thereby summarizing various research aspects of spatial audio. In addition, we review related datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmarks, offering insights from both training and evaluation perspectives. Related materials are available at https://github.com/dieKarotte/ASAudio.

Remote sensing change detection aims to localize semantic changes between images of the same location captured at different times. In the past few years, newer methods have attributed enhanced performance to the additions of new and complex components to existing architectures. Most fail to measure the performance contribution of fundamental design choices such as backbone selection, pre-training strategies, and training configurations. We claim that such fundamental design choices often improve performance even more significantly than the addition of new architectural components. Due to that, we systematically revisit the design space of change detection models and analyse the full potential of a well-optimised baseline. We identify a set of fundamental design choices that benefit both new and existing architectures. Leveraging this insight, we demonstrate that when carefully designed, even an architecturally simple model can match or surpass state-of-the-art performance on six challenging change detection datasets. Our best practices generalise beyond our architecture and also offer performance improvements when applied to related methods, indicating that the space of fundamental design choices has been underexplored. Our guidelines and architecture provide a strong foundation for future methods, emphasizing that optimizing core components is just as important as architectural novelty in advancing change detection performance. Code: https://github.com/blaz-r/BTC-change-detection

Despite efforts to mitigate the inherent risks and biases of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, these algorithms can disproportionately impact culturally marginalized groups. A range of approaches has been proposed to address or reduce these risks, including the development of ethical guidelines and principles for responsible AI, as well as technical solutions that promote algorithmic fairness. Drawing on design justice, expansive learning theory, and recent empirical work on participatory AI, we argue that mitigating these harms requires a fundamental re-architecture of the AI production pipeline. This re-design should center co-production, diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and multidisciplinary collaboration. We introduce an augmented AI lifecycle consisting of five interconnected phases: co-framing, co-design, co-implementation, co-deployment, and co-maintenance. The lifecycle is informed by four multidisciplinary workshops and grounded in themes of distributed authority and iterative knowledge exchange. Finally, we relate the proposed lifecycle to several leading ethical frameworks and outline key research questions that remain for scaling participatory governance.

Graphic design forms the cornerstone of modern visual communication, serving as a vital medium for promoting cultural and commercial events. Recent advances have explored automating this process using Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), yet existing methods often produce geometrically inaccurate layouts and lack the iterative, layer-specific editing required in professional workflows. To address these limitations, we present PosterCopilot, a framework that advances layout reasoning and controllable editing for professional graphic design. Specifically, we introduce a progressive three-stage training strategy that equips LMMs with geometric understanding and aesthetic reasoning for layout design, consisting of Perturbed Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning for Visual-Reality Alignment, and Reinforcement Learning from Aesthetic Feedback. Furthermore, we develop a complete workflow that couples the trained LMM-based design model with generative models, enabling layer-controllable, iterative editing for precise element refinement while maintaining global visual consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PosterCopilot achieves geometrically accurate and aesthetically superior layouts, offering unprecedented controllability for professional iterative design.

Advertising banners are critical for capturing user attention and enhancing advertising campaign effectiveness. Creating aesthetically pleasing banner designs while conveying the campaign messages is challenging due to the large search space involving multiple design elements. Additionally, advertisers need multiple sizes for different displays and various versions to target different sectors of audiences. Since design is intrinsically an iterative and subjective process, flexible editability is also in high demand for practical usage. While current models have served as assistants to human designers in various design tasks, they typically handle only segments of the creative design process or produce pixel-based outputs that limit editability. This paper introduces a training-free framework for fully automated banner ad design creation, enabling frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to streamline the production of effective banners with minimal manual effort across diverse marketing contexts. We present BannerAgency, an MLLM agent system that collaborates with advertisers to understand their brand identity and banner objectives, generates matching background images, creates blueprints for foreground design elements, and renders the final creatives as editable components in Figma or SVG formats rather than static pixels. To facilitate evaluation and future research, we introduce BannerRequest400, a benchmark featuring 100 unique logos paired with 400 diverse banner requests. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, emphasizing the quality of the generated banner designs, their adaptability to various banner requests, and their strong editability enabled by this component-based approach.

Generating animated 3D objects is at the heart of many applications, yet most advanced works are typically difficult to apply in practice because of their limited setup, their long runtime, or their limited quality. We introduce ActionMesh, a generative model that predicts production-ready 3D meshes "in action" in a feed-forward manner. Drawing inspiration from early video models, our key insight is to modify existing 3D diffusion models to include a temporal axis, resulting in a framework we dubbed "temporal 3D diffusion". Specifically, we first adapt the 3D diffusion stage to generate a sequence of synchronized latents representing time-varying and independent 3D shapes. Second, we design a temporal 3D autoencoder that translates a sequence of independent shapes into the corresponding deformations of a pre-defined reference shape, allowing us to build an animation. Combining these two components, ActionMesh generates animated 3D meshes from different inputs like a monocular video, a text description, or even a 3D mesh with a text prompt describing its animation. Besides, compared to previous approaches, our method is fast and produces results that are rig-free and topology consistent, hence enabling rapid iteration and seamless applications like texturing and retargeting. We evaluate our model on standard video-to-4D benchmarks (Consistent4D, Objaverse) and report state-of-the-art performances on both geometric accuracy and temporal consistency, demonstrating that our model can deliver animated 3D meshes with unprecedented speed and quality.

Recent Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet remain challenged by video understanding tasks that require consistent temporal ordering and causal coherence. Many parameter-efficient Video-LLMs rely on unconstrained bidirectional projectors to model inter-frame interactions, which can blur temporal ordering by allowing later frames to influence earlier representations, without explicit architectural mechanisms to respect the directional nature of video reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose V-CORE, a parameter-efficient framework that introduces explicit temporal ordering constraints for video understanding. V-CORE consists of two key components: (1) Learnable Spatial Aggregation (LSA), which adaptively selects salient spatial tokens to reduce redundancy, and (2) a Causality-Aware Temporal Projector (CATP), which enforces structured unidirectional information flow via block-causal attention and a terminal dynamic summary token acting as a causal sink. This design preserves intra-frame spatial interactions while ensuring that temporal information is aggregated in a strictly ordered manner. With 4-bit QLoRA and a frozen LLM backbone, V-CORE can be trained efficiently on a single consumer GPU. Experiments show that V-CORE achieves strong performance on the challenging NExT-QA benchmark, reaching 61.2% accuracy, and remains competitive across MSVD-QA, MSRVTT-QA, and TGIF-QA, with gains concentrated in temporal and causal reasoning subcategories (+3.5% and +5.2% respectively), directly validating the importance of explicit temporal ordering constraints.

We introduce BikeBench, an engineering design benchmark for evaluating generative models on problems with multiple real-world objectives and constraints. As generative AI's reach continues to grow, evaluating its capability to understand physical laws, human guidelines, and hard constraints grows increasingly important. Engineering product design lies at the intersection of these difficult tasks, providing new challenges for AI capabilities. BikeBench evaluates AI models' capabilities to generate bicycle designs that not only resemble the dataset, but meet specific performance objectives and constraints. To do so, BikeBench quantifies a variety of human-centered and multiphysics performance characteristics, such as aerodynamics, ergonomics, structural mechanics, human-rated usability, and similarity to subjective text or image prompts. Supporting the benchmark are several datasets of simulation results, a dataset of 10,000 human-rated bicycle assessments, and a synthetically generated dataset of 1.6M designs, each with a parametric, CAD/XML, SVG, and PNG representation. BikeBench is uniquely configured to evaluate tabular generative models, large language models (LLMs), design optimization, and hybrid algorithms side-by-side. Our experiments indicate that LLMs and tabular generative models fall short of hybrid GenAI+optimization algorithms in design quality, constraint satisfaction, and similarity scores, suggesting significant room for improvement. We hope that BikeBench, a first-of-its-kind benchmark, will help catalyze progress in generative AI for constrained multi-objective engineering design problems. We provide code, data, an interactive leaderboard, and other resources at https://github.com/Lyleregenwetter/BikeBench.

Realistic 3D indoor scene synthesis is vital for embodied AI and digital content creation. It can be naturally divided into two subtasks: object generation and layout generation. While recent generative models have significantly advanced object-level quality and controllability, layout generation remains challenging due to limited datasets. Existing methods either overfit to these datasets or rely on predefined constraints to optimize numerical layout that sacrifice flexibility. As a result, they fail to generate scenes that are both open-vocabulary and aligned with fine-grained user instructions. We introduce DirectLayout, a framework that directly generates numerical 3D layouts from text descriptions using generalizable spatial reasoning of large language models (LLMs). DirectLayout decomposes the generation into three stages: producing a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) layout, lifting it into 3D space, and refining object placements. To enable explicit spatial reasoning and help the model grasp basic principles of object placement, we employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Activation based on the 3D-Front dataset. Additionally, we design CoT-Grounded Generative Layout Reward to enhance generalization and spatial planning. During inference, DirectLayout addresses asset-layout mismatches via Iterative Asset-Layout Alignment through in-context learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DirectLayout achieves impressive semantic consistency, generalization and physical plausibility.

Modern engineering, spanning electrical, mechanical, aerospace, civil, and computer disciplines, stands as a cornerstone of human civilization and the foundation of our society. However, engineering design poses a fundamentally different challenge for large language models (LLMs) compared with traditional textbook-style problem solving or factual question answering. Although existing benchmarks have driven progress in areas such as language understanding, code synthesis, and scientific problem solving, real-world engineering design demands the synthesis of domain knowledge, navigation of complex trade-offs, and management of the tedious processes that consume much of practicing engineers' time. Despite these shared challenges across engineering disciplines, no benchmark currently captures the unique demands of engineering design work. In this work, we introduce EngDesign, an Engineering Design benchmark that evaluates LLMs' abilities to perform practical design tasks across nine engineering domains. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on factual recall or question answering, EngDesign uniquely emphasizes LLMs' ability to synthesize domain knowledge, reason under constraints, and generate functional, objective-oriented engineering designs. Each task in EngDesign represents a real-world engineering design problem, accompanied by a detailed task description specifying design goals, constraints, and performance requirements. EngDesign pioneers a simulation-based evaluation paradigm that moves beyond textbook knowledge to assess genuine engineering design capabilities and shifts evaluation from static answer checking to dynamic, simulation-driven functional verification, marking a crucial step toward realizing the vision of engineering Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

We introduce Habitat 2.0 (H2.0), a simulation platform for training virtual robots in interactive 3D environments and complex physics-enabled scenarios. We make comprehensive contributions to all levels of the embodied AI stack - data, simulation, and benchmark tasks. Specifically, we present: (i) ReplicaCAD: an artist-authored, annotated, reconfigurable 3D dataset of apartments (matching real spaces) with articulated objects (e.g. cabinets and drawers that can open/close); (ii) H2.0: a high-performance physics-enabled 3D simulator with speeds exceeding 25,000 simulation steps per second (850x real-time) on an 8-GPU node, representing 100x speed-ups over prior work; and, (iii) Home Assistant Benchmark (HAB): a suite of common tasks for assistive robots (tidy the house, prepare groceries, set the table) that test a range of mobile manipulation capabilities. These large-scale engineering contributions allow us to systematically compare deep reinforcement learning (RL) at scale and classical sense-plan-act (SPA) pipelines in long-horizon structured tasks, with an emphasis on generalization to new objects, receptacles, and layouts. We find that (1) flat RL policies struggle on HAB compared to hierarchical ones; (2) a hierarchy with independent skills suffers from 'hand-off problems', and (3) SPA pipelines are more brittle than RL policies.

Integrating modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, particularly generative AI, holds the promise of revolutionizing computer-aided design (CAD) tools and the engineering design process. However, the direction of "AI+CAD" remains unclear: how will the current generation of intelligent CAD (ICAD) differ from its predecessor in the 1980s and 1990s, what strategic pathways should researchers and engineers pursue for its implementation, and what potential technical challenges might arise? As an attempt to address these questions, this paper investigates the transformative role of modern AI techniques in advancing CAD towards ICAD. It first analyzes the design process and reconsiders the roles AI techniques can assume in this process, highlighting how they can restructure the path humans, computers, and designs interact with each other. The primary conclusion is that ICAD systems should assume an intensional rather than extensional role in the design process. This offers insights into the evaluation of the previous generation of ICAD (ICAD 1.0) and outlines a prospective framework and trajectory for the next generation of ICAD (ICAD 2.0).

This paper presents a novel generative model for Computer Aided Design (CAD) that 1) represents high-level design concepts of a CAD model as a three-level hierarchical tree of neural codes, from global part arrangement down to local curve geometry; and 2) controls the generation or completion of CAD models by specifying the target design using a code tree. Concretely, a novel variant of a vector quantized VAE with "masked skip connection" extracts design variations as neural codebooks at three levels. Two-stage cascaded auto-regressive transformers learn to generate code trees from incomplete CAD models and then complete CAD models following the intended design. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance on conventional tasks such as random generation while enabling novel interaction capabilities on conditional generation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/samxuxiang/hnc-cad.

Modern technology driven information systems are part of our daily lives. However, this deep integration poses new challenges to the human computer interaction (HCI) professionals. With the rapid growth of mobile and cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), the demand for HCI specialists to design user-friendly and adaptable interfaces has never been more pressing. Especially for diverse user groups such as children, the elderly and people with disabilities who need interfaces tailored to their needs regardless of time and location. This study reviewed 50 recent papers on HCI interface design for modern information systems. The goal is to see how well these methods address the demands of current technology. The findings show that most HCI design methods are still based on old desktop models and do not support mobile users and location-based services well. Most existing interface design guidelines do not align with the flexibility and dynamism of emerging technologies. The goal of this study is to improve interface design by combining agile methodologies with human-centered design principles. Future studies should also incorporate both qualitative and quantitative approaches, particularly in the context of cloud-based technologies and organizational information systems. This approach aims to bridge the gap between current interface design practices and the changing technological landscape.

Can an AI autonomously design mechanisms for computer systems on par with the creativity and reasoning of human experts? We present Glia, an AI architecture for networked systems design that uses large language models (LLMs) in a human-inspired, multi-agent workflow. Each agent specializes in reasoning, experimentation, and analysis, collaborating through an evaluation framework that grounds abstract reasoning in empirical feedback. Unlike prior ML-for-systems methods that optimize black-box policies, Glia generates interpretable designs and exposes its reasoning process. When applied to a distributed GPU cluster for LLM inference, it produces new algorithms for request routing, scheduling, and auto-scaling that perform at human-expert levels in significantly less time, while yielding novel insights into workload behavior. Our results suggest that by combining reasoning LLMs with structured experimentation, an AI can produce creative and understandable designs for complex systems problems.

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets -- CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore -- the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.

Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.