mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

DesignBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for MLLM-based Front-end Code Generation

arXiv 2506.06251 ↗First posted 6 Jun 2025cs.SE cs.AIcited by 45

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Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in automated front-end engineering, e.g., generating UI code from visual designs. However, existing front-end UI code generation benchmarks have the following limitations: (1) While framework-based development becomes predominant in modern front-end programming, current benchmarks fail to incorporate mainstream development frameworks. (2) Existing evaluations focus solely on the UI code generation task, whereas practical UI development involves several iterations, including refining editing, and repairing issues. (3) Current benchmarks employ unidimensional evaluation, lacking investigation into influencing factors like task difficulty, input context variations, and in-depth code-level analysis. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DesignBench, a multi-framework, multi-task evaluation benchmark for assessing MLLMs' capabilities in automated front-end engineering. DesignBench encompasses three widely-used UI frameworks (React, Vue, and Angular) alongside vanilla HTML/CSS, and evaluates on three essential front-end tasks (generation, edit, and repair) in real-world development workflows. DesignBench contains 900 webpage samples spanning over 11 topics, 9 edit types, and 6 issue categories, enabling detailed analysis of MLLM performance across multiple dimensions. Our systematic evaluation reveals critical insights into MLLMs' framework-specific limitations, task-related bottlenecks, and performance variations under different conditions, providing guidance for future research in automated front-end development. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/WebPAI/DesignBench.

Key facts. Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 27 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2025.

Builds on

27 of 60 references.

References · 27

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  3. 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 2,004
  4. 2024BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructionscited by 546
  5. 2024MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmarkcited by 372
  6. 2024CRUXEval: A Benchmark for Code Reasoning, Understanding and Executioncited by 300
  7. 2024SWE-bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?cited by 203
  8. 2024Pixtral 12Bcited by 179
  9. 2024Unlocking the conversion of Web Screenshots into HTML Code with the WebSight Datasetcited by 129
  10. 2017pix2code: Generating Code from a Graphical User Interface Screenshotcited by 114
  11. 2024Web2Code: A Large-scale Webpage-to-Code Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Multimodal LLMscited by 74
  12. 2025Can LLMs Replace Human Evaluators? An Empirical Study of LLM-as-a-Judge in Software Engineeringcited by 67
15 more
  1. 2024WebCode2M: A Real-World Dataset for Code Generation from Webpage Designscited by 44
  2. 2024MMCode: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Code Generation with Visually Rich Programming Problemscited by 40
  3. 2018Machine Learning-Based Prototyping of Graphical User Interfaces for Mobile Appscited by 36
  4. 2024Automatically Generating UI Code from Screenshot: A Divide-and-Conquer-Based Approachcited by 24
  5. 2024MRWeb: An Exploration of Generating Multi-Page Resource-Aware Web Code from UI Designscited by 24
  6. 2019Sketch2Code: Transformation of Sketches to UI in Real-time Using Deep Neural Networkcited by 23
  7. 2024Bridging Design and Development with Automated Declarative UI Code Generationcited by 19
  8. 2021Wireframe-Based UI Design Search Through Image Autoencodercited by 17
  9. 2020Owl Eyes: Spotting UI Display Issues via Visual Understandingcited by 16
  10. 2025CodeCrash: Exposing LLM Fragility to Misleading Natural Language in Code Reasoningcited by 14
  11. 2024Empowering Agile-Based Generative Software Development through Human-AI Teamworkcited by 12
  12. 2024LogoMotion: Visually-Grounded Code Synthesis for Creating and Editing Animationcited by 10
  13. 2024Misty: UI Prototyping Through Interactive Conceptual Blendingcited by 9
  14. 2022Nighthawk: Fully Automated Localizing UI Display Issues via Visual Understandingcited by 6
  15. 2024DesignRepair: Dual-Stream Design Guideline-Aware Frontend Repair with Large Language Modelscited by 6

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 15; 2026: 30.

45 papers.

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  1. 2025ScreenCoder: Advancing Visual-to-Code Generation for Front-End Automation via Modular Multimodal Agentscited by 26
  2. 2025SlideCoder: Layout-aware RAG-enhanced Hierarchical Slide Generation from Designcited by 24
  3. 2026WebCoderBench: Benchmarking Web Application Generation with Comprehensive and Interpretable Evaluation Metricscited by 18
  4. 2025WebGen-Agent: Enhancing Interactive Website Generation with Multi-Level Feedback and Step-Level Reinforcement Learningcited by 15
  5. 2025FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedbackcited by 14
  6. 2025JanusCoder: Towards a Foundational Visual-Programmatic Interface for Code Intelligencecited by 9
  7. 2026EfficientPosterGen: Semantic-aware Efficient Poster Generation via Token Compression and Accurate Violation Detectioncited by 9
  8. 2026WorldCoder-Bench: Benchmarking Physically Grounded 3D World Synthesiscited by 9
  9. 2026WebVR: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs for WebPage Recreation from Videos via Human-Aligned Visual Rubricscited by 8
  10. 2025Automatically Generating Web Applications from Requirements Via Multi-Agent Test-Driven Developmentcited by 7
  11. 2026SWE-Chain: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Chained Release-Level Package Upgradescited by 7
  12. 2025Benchmarking MLLM-based Web Understanding: Reasoning, Robustness and Safetycited by 6
33 more
  1. 2026WebCompass: Towards Multimodal Web Coding Evaluation for Code Language Modelscited by 6
  2. 2026Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligencecited by 6
  3. 2025EfficientUICoder: A Bidirectional Token Compression Framework for Efficient MLLM-Based UI Code Generationcited by 5
  4. 20253D Software Synthesis Driven by Constraint-Expressive Intermediate Representationcited by 4
  5. 2025InteractScience: Programmatic and Visually-Grounded Evaluation of Interactive Scientific Demonstration Code Generationcited by 4
  6. 2026WebTestBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents towards End-to-End Automated Web Testingcited by 4
  7. 2025UI-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Design Capabilities of AI Text-to-App Toolscited by 3
  8. 2026Cookie-Bench: Continuous On-screen Key Interaction Evaluation for Web Generationcited by 3
  9. 2026I-WebGenBench : Evaluating Interactivity in LLM-Generated Scientific Web Applicationscited by 3
  10. 2026FullStack-Agent: Enhancing Agentic Full-Stack Web Coding via Development-Oriented Testing and Repository Back-Translationcited by 2
  11. 2026HTMLCure: Turning Browser Experience into State Guided Repair for Interactive HTMLcited by 2
  12. 2026HDSL: A Hierarchical Domain-Specific Language for Structured 3D Indoor Scene Generation and Localized Editing with LLM Agentscited by 2
  13. 2025TREAT: A Code LLMs Trustworthiness / Reliability Evaluation and Testing Frameworkcited by 1
  14. 2026VulTriage: Triple-Path Context Augmentation for LLM-Based Vulnerability Detectioncited by 1
  15. 2026VideoVIBE: A Video-Grounded Diagnostic Benchmark for One-Shot Interactive Website Generationcited by 1
  16. 2026From Visual Widgets to UI Code: Efficient Tool-Grounded Generationcited by 1
  17. 2026RecreationWorld: Scalable and Verifiable Environments for Hybrid Computer-Use Agentscited by 1
  18. 2025Semantic-aware Graph-guided Behavior Sequences Generation with Large Language Models for Smart Homescited by 0
  19. 2025Beyond Prototyping: Autonomous, Enterprise-Grade Frontend Development from Pixel to Production via a Specialized Multi-Agent Frameworkcited by 0
  20. 2025PyFi: Toward Pyramid-like Financial Image Understanding for VLMs via Adversarial Agentscited by 0
  21. 2026Learning to Construct Practical Agentic Systemscited by 0
  22. 2026UI2App: Benchmarking Visual Interaction Inference in Executable Web Application Generationcited by 0
  23. 2026CodeShrink: Adaptive Visual Compression for Efficient Multimodal Code Understandingcited by 0
  24. 2026Pattern over Pixels: Measuring Pattern Completion Bias in Multimodal Code Generationcited by 0
  25. 2026OpenHarmony Bench: Evaluating LLMs and Coding Agents on OpenHarmony App Developmentcited by 0
  26. 2026WebWorld: The Browser as a World Model for Self-Improving Web Codecited by 0
  27. 2026Editable Visual Designcited by 0
  28. 2026Enabling Creative Exploration for Vibe Design Agentscited by 0
  29. 2026AUV-Bench: Aesthetic Understanding and Generation Evaluation for User Interfacescited by 0
  30. 2026WebUIProof: Benchmarking WebUI Code Generators with UI-Agent Execution Harnesscited by 0
  31. 2026TaoD2C-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Industrial UI Code Generation Beyond Visual Fidelitycited by 0
  32. 2026Pixels or Code? Benchmarking Instruction-Guided Visual Artifact Operationcited by 0
  33. 2026PrismaCoder: Pushing the Boundaries of Open Multimodal Code Intelligence through Decomposed Rubric Synthesiscited by 0

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  1. 2025FullFront: Benchmarking MLLMs Across the Full Front-End Engineering Workflow
  2. 2024Interaction2Code: Benchmarking MLLM-based Interactive Webpage Code Generation from Interactive Prototyping
  3. 2024Design2Code: Benchmarking Multimodal Code Generation for Automated Front-End Engineering
  4. 20261D-Bench: A Benchmark for Iterative UI Code Generation with Visual Feedback in Real-World
  5. 2026Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs on Code Generation for Complex Interactive Webpages
  6. 2025ArtifactsBench: Bridging the Visual-Interactive Gap in LLM Code Generation Evaluation
  7. 2025Advancing vision-language models in front-end development via data synthesis
  8. 2025WebUIBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in WebUI-to-Code