{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T03:05:08Z","timestamp":1773803108587,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)","issue":"27","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["AAAI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Design generation, in its essence, is a step-by-step process where designers progressively refine and enhance their work through careful modifications. Despite this fundamental characteristic, existing approaches mainly treat design synthesis as a single-step generation problem, significantly underestimating the inherent complexity of the creative process. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel problem setting called Step-by-step Layered Design Generation, that tasks a machine learning model to generate a design, adhering to a sequence of instructions from a designer. Leveraging the recent advancements in Multi-modal LLMs, we propose SLEDGE: Step-by-step LayEred Design GEnerator to model each update to a design as an atomic layered change over its previous state, while being grounded on the instruction.To complement our new problem setting, we introduce a new evaluation suite, including a dataset and a benchmark. Our exhaustive experimental analysis and comparison with state-of-the-art approaches adapted to our new setup bring out the efficacy of our approach. We hope our work will attract attention to this pragmatic and under-explored research area.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v40i27.39415","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T01:34:23Z","timestamp":1773797663000},"page":"22554-22562","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Step-by-step Layered Design Generation"],"prefix":"10.1609","volume":"40","author":[{"given":"Faizan Farooq","family":"Khan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Joseph K","family":"J","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Koustava","family":"Goswami","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Mohamed","family":"Elhoseiny","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Balaji Vasan","family":"Srinivasan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"9382","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"container-title":["Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/39415\/43376","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/39415\/43376","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T01:34:23Z","timestamp":1773797663000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/view\/39415"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"references-count":0,"journal-issue":{"issue":"27","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,17]]}},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1609\/aaai.v40i27.39415","relation":{},"ISSN":["2374-3468","2159-5399"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2374-3468","type":"electronic"},{"value":"2159-5399","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]}}}