GraphicWeaver: Benchmarking Agentic Planning for Graphic Design Generation

Dayeon Ki, Tianyi Zhou, Marine Carpuat, Gang Wu, Puneet Mathur, Viswanathan Swaminathan


Abstract
Vision-language model (VLM)-powered agents are increasingly enabling new forms of automation across various human tasks. While prior work has primarily focused on well-defined problems with explicit goals, the capabilities of agents in creative graphic design, where goals are inherently open-ended and subjective, remain largely underexplored.To bridge this gap, we introduce GraphicWeaver, a planning benchmark for graphic design comprising 1,079 diverse user queries and associated images spanning four design categories.Comprehensive experiments with six models reveal that current VLM-based agents struggle to handle such complex planning tasks, which require taking into account both explicit design constraints specified in queries and implicit commonsense design principles. We attribute these failures to challenges in (1) retrieving appropriate parameters for tool usage, (2) understanding spatial relationships across design components, and (3) coordinating dependencies across agents. We envision GraphicWeaver as a challenging yet valuable testbed for advancing VLM agent planning in creative design contexts.
Anthology ID:
2026.alvr-main.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Qianqi Yan, Syrielle Montariol, Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Jiayi Pan, Manling Li, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Alane Suhr, Xin Eric Wang
Venues:
ALVR | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
57–84
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.alvr-main.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dayeon Ki, Tianyi Zhou, Marine Carpuat, Gang Wu, Puneet Mathur, and Viswanathan Swaminathan. 2026. GraphicWeaver: Benchmarking Agentic Planning for Graphic Design Generation. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR), pages 57–84, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GraphicWeaver: Benchmarking Agentic Planning for Graphic Design Generation (Ki et al., ALVR 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.alvr-main.5.pdf