AutoPresent: Designing Structured Visuals from Scratch
Authors: name: Jiaxin Ge, name: Zora Zhiruo Wang, name: Xuhui Zhou, name: Yi-Hao Peng, name: Sanjay Subramanian, name: Qinyue Tan, name: Maarten Sap, name: Alane Suhr, name: Daniel Fried, name: Graham Neubig, name: Trevor Darrell

Designing structured visuals such as presentation slides is essential for
communicative needs, necessitating both content creation and visual planning
skills. In this work, we tackle the challenge of automated slide generation,
where models produce slide presentations from natural language (NL)
instructions. We first introduce the SlidesBench benchmark, the first benchmark
for slide generation with 7k training and 585 testing examples derived from 310
slide decks across 10 domains. SlidesBench supports evaluations that are
(i)reference-based to measure similarity to a target slide, and
(ii)reference-free to measure the design quality of generated slides alone. We
benchmark end-to-end image generation and program generation methods with a
variety of models, and find that programmatic methods produce higher-quality
slides in user-interactable formats. Built on the success of program
generation, we create AutoPresent, an 8B Llama-based model trained on 7k pairs
of instructions paired with code for slide generation, and achieve results
comparable to the closed-source model GPT-4o. We further explore iterative
design refinement where the model is tasked to self-refine its own output, and
we found that this process improves the slide's quality. We hope that our work
will provide a basis for future work on generating structured visuals.