# Reverse-Engineering Information Presentations: Recovering Hierarchical Grouping from Layouts of Visual Elements

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.05194 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05194/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [OpenING: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Judging Open-ended Interleaved Image-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18499/) (2024)
- [LightVA: Lightweight Visual Analytics with LLM Agent-Based Task Planning and Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05651/) (2024)
- [Desigen: A Pipeline for Controllable Design Template Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09093/) (2024)
- [Spot the Error: Non-autoregressive Graphic Layout Generation with Wireframe Locator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16375/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual elements in an information presentation are often spatially and semantically grouped hierarchically for effective message delivery. Studying the hierarchical grouping information can help researchers and designers better explore layout structures and understand design demographics. However, recovering hierarchical grouping is challenging due to a large number of possibilities for compositing visual elements into a single-page design. This paper introduces an automatic approach that takes the layout of visual elements as input and returns the hierarchical grouping as output. To understand information presentations, we first contribute a dataset of 23,072 information presentations with diverse layouts to the community. Next, we propose our technique with a Transformer-based model to predict relatedness between visual elements and a bottom-up algorithm to produce the hierarchical grouping. Finally, we evaluate our technique through a technical experiment and a user study with 30 designers. The results show that the proposed technique is promising.