Order Matters: Learning Element Ordering for Graphic Design Generation

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed an emergent interest in building generative models for the graphic design domain. For adoption of powerful deep generative models with Transformer-based neural backbones, prior approaches formulate designs as ordered sequences of elements, and simply order the elements in a random or raster manner. We argue that such naive ordering methods are sub-optimal and there is room for improving sample quality through a better choice of order between graphic design elements. In this paper, we seek to explore the space of orderings to find the ordering strategy that optimizes the performance of graphic design generation models. For this, we propose a model, namely G enerative O rder L earner (GOL), which trains an autoregressive generator on design sequences, jointly with an ordering network that sort design elements to maximize the generation quality. With unsupervised training on vector graphic design data, our model is capable of learning a content-adaptive ordering approach, called neural order. Our experiments show that the generator trained with our neural order converges faster, achieving remarkably improved generation quality compared with using alternative ordering baselines. We conduct comprehensive analysis of our learned order to have a deeper understanding of its ordering behaviors. In addition, our learned order can generalize well to diffusion-based generative models and help design generators scale up excellently.