WAFFLE: Multi-Modal Model for Automated Front-End Development
Authors: name: Shanchao Liang, name: Nan Jiang, name: Shangshu Qian, name: Lin Tan

Web development involves turning UI designs into functional webpages, which
can be difficult for both beginners and experienced developers due to the
complexity of HTML's hierarchical structures and styles. While Large Language
Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating source code, two major
challenges persist in UI-to-HTML code generation: (1) effectively representing
HTML's hierarchical structure for LLMs, and (2) bridging the gap between the
visual nature of UI designs and the text-based format of HTML code. To tackle
these challenges, we introduce Waffle, a new fine-tuning strategy that uses a
structure-aware attention mechanism to improve LLMs' understanding of HTML's
structure and a contrastive fine-tuning approach to align LLMs' understanding
of UI images and HTML code. Models fine-tuned with Waffle show up to 9.00 pp
(percentage point) higher HTML match, 0.0982 higher CW-SSIM, 32.99 higher CLIP,
and 27.12 pp higher LLEM on our new benchmark WebSight-Test and an existing
benchmark Design2Code, outperforming current fine-tuning methods.