PosterForest: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration for Scientific Poster Generation

Jiho Choi, Seojeong Park, Seongjong Song, Hyunjung Shim


Abstract
Automating scientific poster generation requires hierarchical document understanding and coherent content-layout planning.Existing methods often rely on flat summarization or optimize content and layout separately.As a result, they often suffer from information loss, weak logical flow, and poor visual balance.We present PosterForest, a training-free framework for scientific poster generation.Our method introduces the Poster Tree, a structured intermediate representation that captures document hierarchy and visual-textual semantics across multiple levels.Building on this representation, content and layout agents perform hierarchical reasoning and recursive refinement, progressively optimizing the poster from global organization to local composition.This joint optimization improves semantic coherence, logical flow, and visual harmony.Experiments show that PosterForest outperforms prior methods in both automatic and human evaluations, without additional training or domain-specific supervision.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
379–401
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.15/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiho Choi, Seojeong Park, Seongjong Song, and Hyunjung Shim. 2026. PosterForest: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration for Scientific Poster Generation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 379–401, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PosterForest: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration for Scientific Poster Generation (Choi et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.15.pdf
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