TikZero: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Graphics Program Synthesis
Authors: name: Jonas Belouadi; name: Eddy Ilg; name: Margret Keuper; name: Hideki Tanaka; name: Masao Utiyama; name: Raj Dabre; name: Steffen Eger; name: Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Published: 2025-03-14 15:29:58

Abstract: With the rise of generative AI, synthesizing figures from text captions
becomes a compelling application. However, achieving high geometric precision
and editability requires representing figures as graphics programs in languages
like TikZ, and aligned training data (i.e., graphics programs with captions)
remains scarce. Meanwhile, large amounts of unaligned graphics programs and
captioned raster images are more readily available. We reconcile these
disparate data sources by presenting TikZero, which decouples graphics program
generation from text understanding by using image representations as an
intermediary bridge. It enables independent training on graphics programs and
captioned images and allows for zero-shot text-guided graphics program
synthesis during inference. We show that our method substantially outperforms
baselines that can only operate with caption-aligned graphics programs.
Furthermore, when leveraging caption-aligned graphics programs as a
complementary training signal, TikZero matches or exceeds the performance of
much larger models, including commercial systems like GPT-4o. Our code,
datasets, and select models are publicly available.