# StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11556 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11556/

## Key facts

- Cited by 102 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [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)
- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (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)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 102)

- [AutoPresent: Designing Structured Visuals from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00912/) (2025)
- [VAGEN: Reinforcing World Model Reasoning for Multi-Turn VLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16907/) (2025)
- [StructEval: Benchmarking LLMs' Capabilities to Generate Structural Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20139/) (2025)
- [SlideCoder: Layout-aware RAG-enhanced Hierarchical Slide Generation from Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07964/) (2025)
- [AutoFigure: Generating and Refining Publication-Ready Scientific Illustrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03828/) (2026)
- [VinciCoder: Unifying Multimodal Code Generation via Coarse-to-fine Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00391/) (2025)
- [Breaking the SFT Plateau: Multimodal Structured Reinforcement Learning for Chart-to-Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13587/) (2025)
- [WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16763/) (2025)
- [VCode: a Multimodal Coding Benchmark with SVG as Symbolic Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02778/) (2025)
- [Visually Descriptive Language Model for Vector Graphics Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06479/) (2024)
- [LitLLMs, LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15249/) (2024)
- [Draw with Thought: Unleashing Multimodal Reasoning for Scientific Diagram Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09479/) (2025)
- [InternSVG: Towards Unified SVG Tasks with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11341/) (2025)
- [AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06674/) (2026)
- [Multimodal OCR: Parse Anything from Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13032/) (2026)
- [Render-in-the-Loop: Vector Graphics Generation via Visual Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20730/) (2026)
- [AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18661/) (2026)
- [AlignVLM: Bridging Vision and Language Latent Spaces for Multimodal Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01341/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Large Model: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08189/) (2025)
- [Octopus: Agentic Multimodal Reasoning with Six-Capability Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15351/) (2025)
- [VisRefiner: Learning from Visual Differences for Screenshot-to-Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05998/) (2026)
- [EfficientPosterGen: Semantic-aware Efficient Poster Generation via Token Compression and Accurate Violation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00155/) (2026)
- [SVGThinker: Instruction-Aligned and Reasoning-Driven Text-to-SVG Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24299/) (2025)
- [DuetSVG: Unified Multimodal SVG Generation with Internal Visual Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10894/) (2025)
- [SciFig: Towards Automating Editable Figure Generation for Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04390/) (2026)
- [Symbolic Graphics Programming with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05208/) (2025)
- [VisPhyWorld: Probing Physical Reasoning via Code-Driven Video Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13294/) (2026)
- [BigCodeArena: Unveiling More Reliable Human Preferences in Code Generation via Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08697/) (2025)
- [VisCoder2: Building Multi-Language Visualization Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23642/) (2025)
- [VAnim: Rendering-Aware Sparse State Modeling for Structure-Preserving Vector Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01517/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are vital for modern image rendering due to their scalability and versatility. Previous SVG generation methods have focused on curve-based vectorization, lacking semantic understanding, often producing artifacts, and struggling with SVG primitives beyond path curves. To address these issues, we introduce StarVector, a multimodal large language model for SVG generation. It performs image vectorization by understanding image semantics and using SVG primitives for compact, precise outputs. Unlike traditional methods, StarVector works directly in the SVG code space, leveraging visual understanding to apply accurate SVG primitives. To train StarVector, we create SVG-Stack, a diverse dataset of 2M samples that enables generalization across vectorization tasks and precise use of primitives like ellipses, polygons, and text. We address challenges in SVG evaluation, showing that pixel-based metrics like MSE fail to capture the unique qualities of vector graphics. We introduce SVG-Bench, a benchmark across 10 datasets, and 3 tasks: Image-to-SVG, Text-to-SVG generation, and diagram generation. Using this setup, StarVector achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing more compact and semantically rich SVGs.