# PlanGen: Towards Unified Layout Planning and Image Generation in Auto-Regressive Vision Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10127 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10127/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 75 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [InstanceAssemble: Layout-Aware Image Generation via Instance Assembling Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16691/) (2025)
- [Re-Align: Structured Reasoning-guided Alignment for In-Context Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05124/) (2026)
- [Lay2Story: Extending Diffusion Transformers for Layout-Togglable Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08949/) (2025)
- [InnoAds-Composer: Efficient Condition Composition for E-Commerce Poster Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05898/) (2026)
- [ConsistCompose: Unified Multimodal Layout Control for Image Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18333/) (2025)
- [HiFi-Inpaint: Towards High-Fidelity Reference-Based Inpainting for Generating Detail-Preserving Human-Product Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02210/) (2026)
- [Layer-wise Instance Binding for Regional and Occlusion Control in Text-to-Image Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05769/) (2026)
- [TP-Blend: Textual-Prompt Attention Pairing for Precise Object-Style Blending in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08011/) (2026)
- [Layout-Conditioned Autoregressive Text-to-Image Generation via Structured Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12046/) (2025)
- [CyCLeGen: Cycle-Consistent Layout Prediction and Image Generation in Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14957/) (2026)
- [Residual Decoder Adapter: ID-Preserving Tokenizer Adaption for Autoregressive Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01911/) (2026)
- [RefTon: Reference person shot assist virtual Try-on](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00956/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models are Universal Reasoners for Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04040/) (2026)
- [OcclusionFormer: Arranging Z-Order for Layout-Grounded Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21343/) (2026)
- [MusicLayout: Explicit Structural Planning for Controllable Text-to-Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09035/) (2026)
- [WithEveryone: Unified Planning and Identity Grounding for Group Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20336/) (2026)
- [Bridging Language and Spherical Space: Object-Centric Control for Text-to-Panorama Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20691/) (2026)
- [Planning and Rendering in Concert: DeepFusion of Autoregressive Layouts and Diffusion for Visual Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22916/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a unified layout planning and image generation model, PlanGen, which can pre-plan spatial layout conditions before generating images. Unlike previous diffusion-based models that treat layout planning and layout-to-image as two separate models, PlanGen jointly models the two tasks into one autoregressive transformer using only next-token prediction. PlanGen integrates layout conditions into the model as context without requiring specialized encoding of local captions and bounding box coordinates, which provides significant advantages over the previous embed-and-pool operations on layout conditions, particularly when dealing with complex layouts. Unified prompting allows PlanGen to perform multitasking training related to layout, including layout planning, layout-to-image generation, image layout understanding, etc. In addition, PlanGen can be seamlessly expanded to layout-guided image manipulation thanks to the well-designed modeling, with teacher-forcing content manipulation policy and negative layout guidance. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our PlanGen in multiple layoutrelated tasks, showing its great potential. Code is available at: https://360cvgroup.github.io/PlanGen.