# IconShop: Text-Guided Vector Icon Synthesis with Autoregressive Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14400/

## Key facts

- Cited by 75 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00704/) (2023)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [InCoder: A Generative Model for Code Infilling and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05999/) (2022)
- [Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05511/) (2023)
- [A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03477/) (2017)
- [CogView2: Faster and Better Text-to-Image Generation via Hierarchical Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14217/) (2022)
- [Efficient Training of Language Models to Fill in the Middle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14255/) (2022)
- [CLIPDraw: Exploring Text-to-Drawing Synthesis through Language-Image Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14843/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11556/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Neural Coding for Controllable CAD Model Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00149/) (2023)
- [AutomaTikZ: Text-Guided Synthesis of Scientific Vector Graphics with TikZ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00367/) (2023)
- [SVGDreamer: Text Guided SVG Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16476/) (2023)
- [OmniSVG: A Unified Scalable Vector Graphics Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06263/) (2025)
- [Empowering LLMs to Understand and Generate Complex Vector Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11102/) (2024)
- [COLE: A Hierarchical Generation Framework for Multi-Layered and Editable Graphic Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16974/) (2023)
- [Graphic Design with Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14368/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05902/) (2024)
- [Chat2SVG: Vector Graphics Generation with Large Language Models and Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16602/) (2024)
- [Text-to-Vector Generation with Neural Path Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10317/) (2024)
- [SketchAgent: Language-Driven Sequential Sketch Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17673/) (2024)
- [Analogist: Out-of-the-box Visual In-Context Learning with Image Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10316/) (2024)
- [StrokeNUWA: Tokenizing Strokes for Vector Graphic Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17093/) (2024)
- [SVGEditBench: A Benchmark Dataset for Quantitative Assessment of LLM's SVG Editing Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13710/) (2024)
- [TikZero: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Graphics Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11509/) (2025)
- [Paper2Video: Automatic Video Generation from Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05096/) (2025)
- [Layered Image Vectorization via Semantic Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05404/) (2024)
- [NIVeL: Neural Implicit Vector Layers for Text-to-Vector Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15217/) (2024)
- [NeuralSVG: An Implicit Representation for Text-to-Vector Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03992/) (2025)
- [SVGenius: Benchmarking LLMs in SVG Understanding, Editing and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03139/) (2025)
- [VCode: a Multimodal Coding Benchmark with SVG as Symbolic Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02778/) (2025)
- [UniSVG: A Unified Dataset for Vector Graphic Understanding and Generation with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07766/) (2025)
- [SVGen: Interpretable Vector Graphics Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09168/) (2025)
- [InternSVG: Towards Unified SVG Tasks with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11341/) (2025)
- [Render-in-the-Loop: Vector Graphics Generation via Visual Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20730/) (2026)
- [VCG-Bench: Towards A Unified Visual-Centric Benchmark for Structured Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15677/) (2026)
- [DuetSVG: Unified Multimodal SVG Generation with Internal Visual Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10894/) (2025)
- [Symbolic Graphics Programming with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05208/) (2025)
- [VAnim: Rendering-Aware Sparse State Modeling for Structure-Preserving Vector Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01517/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a popular vector image format that offers good support for interactivity and animation. Despite its appealing characteristics, creating custom SVG content can be challenging for users due to the steep learning curve required to understand SVG grammars or get familiar with professional editing software. Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have inspired researchers to explore vector graphics synthesis using either image-based methods (i.e., text -> raster image -> vector graphics) combining text-to-image generation models with image vectorization, or language-based methods (i.e., text -> vector graphics script) through pretrained large language models. However, these methods still suffer from limitations in terms of generation quality, diversity, and flexibility. In this paper, we introduce IconShop, a text-guided vector icon synthesis method using autoregressive transformers. The key to success of our approach is to sequentialize and tokenize SVG paths (and textual descriptions as guidance) into a uniquely decodable token sequence. With that, we are able to fully exploit the sequence learning power of autoregressive transformers, while enabling both unconditional and text-conditioned icon synthesis. Through standard training to predict the next token on a large-scale vector icon dataset accompanied by textural descriptions, the proposed IconShop consistently exhibits better icon synthesis capability than existing image-based and language-based methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Meanwhile, we observe a dramatic improvement in generation diversity, which is validated by the objective Uniqueness and Novelty measures. More importantly, we demonstrate the flexibility of IconShop with multiple novel icon synthesis tasks, including icon editing, icon interpolation, icon semantic combination, and icon design auto-suggestion.