DesignBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for MLLM-based Front-end Code Generation
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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
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
- 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 2,004
- 2024BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructionscited by 546
- 2024MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmarkcited by 372
- 2024CRUXEval: A Benchmark for Code Reasoning, Understanding and Executioncited by 300
- 2024SWE-bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?cited by 203
- 2024Pixtral 12Bcited by 179
- 2024Unlocking the conversion of Web Screenshots into HTML Code with the WebSight Datasetcited by 129
- 2017pix2code: Generating Code from a Graphical User Interface Screenshotcited by 114
- 2024Web2Code: A Large-scale Webpage-to-Code Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Multimodal LLMscited by 74
- 2025Can LLMs Replace Human Evaluators? An Empirical Study of LLM-as-a-Judge in Software Engineeringcited by 67
15 more
- 2024WebCode2M: A Real-World Dataset for Code Generation from Webpage Designscited by 44
- 2024MMCode: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Code Generation with Visually Rich Programming Problemscited by 40
- 2018Machine Learning-Based Prototyping of Graphical User Interfaces for Mobile Appscited by 36
- 2024Automatically Generating UI Code from Screenshot: A Divide-and-Conquer-Based Approachcited by 24
- 2024MRWeb: An Exploration of Generating Multi-Page Resource-Aware Web Code from UI Designscited by 24
- 2019Sketch2Code: Transformation of Sketches to UI in Real-time Using Deep Neural Networkcited by 23
- 2024Bridging Design and Development with Automated Declarative UI Code Generationcited by 19
- 2021Wireframe-Based UI Design Search Through Image Autoencodercited by 17
- 2020Owl Eyes: Spotting UI Display Issues via Visual Understandingcited by 16
- 2025CodeCrash: Exposing LLM Fragility to Misleading Natural Language in Code Reasoningcited by 14
- 2024Empowering Agile-Based Generative Software Development through Human-AI Teamworkcited by 12
- 2024LogoMotion: Visually-Grounded Code Synthesis for Creating and Editing Animationcited by 10
- 2024Misty: UI Prototyping Through Interactive Conceptual Blendingcited by 9
- 2022Nighthawk: Fully Automated Localizing UI Display Issues via Visual Understandingcited by 6
- 2024DesignRepair: Dual-Stream Design Guideline-Aware Frontend Repair with Large Language Modelscited by 6
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 15; 2026: 30.
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- 2025ScreenCoder: Advancing Visual-to-Code Generation for Front-End Automation via Modular Multimodal Agentscited by 26
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- 20253D Software Synthesis Driven by Constraint-Expressive Intermediate Representationcited by 4
- 2025InteractScience: Programmatic and Visually-Grounded Evaluation of Interactive Scientific Demonstration Code Generationcited by 4
- 2026WebTestBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents towards End-to-End Automated Web Testingcited by 4
- 2025UI-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Design Capabilities of AI Text-to-App Toolscited by 3
- 2026Cookie-Bench: Continuous On-screen Key Interaction Evaluation for Web Generationcited by 3
- 2026I-WebGenBench : Evaluating Interactivity in LLM-Generated Scientific Web Applicationscited by 3
- 2026FullStack-Agent: Enhancing Agentic Full-Stack Web Coding via Development-Oriented Testing and Repository Back-Translationcited by 2
- 2026HTMLCure: Turning Browser Experience into State Guided Repair for Interactive HTMLcited by 2
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- 2025TREAT: A Code LLMs Trustworthiness / Reliability Evaluation and Testing Frameworkcited by 1
- 2026VulTriage: Triple-Path Context Augmentation for LLM-Based Vulnerability Detectioncited by 1
- 2026VideoVIBE: A Video-Grounded Diagnostic Benchmark for One-Shot Interactive Website Generationcited by 1
- 2026From Visual Widgets to UI Code: Efficient Tool-Grounded Generationcited by 1
- 2026RecreationWorld: Scalable and Verifiable Environments for Hybrid Computer-Use Agentscited by 1
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- 2026Learning to Construct Practical Agentic Systemscited by 0
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- 2026CodeShrink: Adaptive Visual Compression for Efficient Multimodal Code Understandingcited by 0
- 2026Pattern over Pixels: Measuring Pattern Completion Bias in Multimodal Code Generationcited by 0
- 2026OpenHarmony Bench: Evaluating LLMs and Coding Agents on OpenHarmony App Developmentcited by 0
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- 2026WebUIProof: Benchmarking WebUI Code Generators with UI-Agent Execution Harnesscited by 0
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- 2026PrismaCoder: Pushing the Boundaries of Open Multimodal Code Intelligence through Decomposed Rubric Synthesis14 Oct 2026
- 2026Pixels or Code? Benchmarking Instruction-Guided Visual Artifact Operation12 Oct 2026
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- 2026WebUIProof: Benchmarking WebUI Code Generators with UI-Agent Execution Harness2 Oct 2026
- 2026AUV-Bench: Aesthetic Understanding and Generation Evaluation for User Interfaces28 Sep 2026
- 2026RecreationWorld: Scalable and Verifiable Environments for Hybrid Computer-Use Agents18 Sep 2026
- 2026Enabling Creative Exploration for Vibe Design Agents14 Sep 2026
- 2026Editable Visual Design3 Sep 2026
- 2026WebWorld: The Browser as a World Model for Self-Improving Web Code31 Aug 2026
- 2026OpenHarmony Bench: Evaluating LLMs and Coding Agents on OpenHarmony App Development17 Aug 2026
- 2026From Visual Widgets to UI Code: Efficient Tool-Grounded Generation12 Aug 2026
- 2026VideoVIBE: A Video-Grounded Diagnostic Benchmark for One-Shot Interactive Website Generation10 Aug 2026
33 more
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- 2026CodeShrink: Adaptive Visual Compression for Efficient Multimodal Code Understanding31 Jul 2026
- 2026UI2App: Benchmarking Visual Interaction Inference in Executable Web Application Generation7 Jul 2026
- 2026Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligence14 Jun 2026
- 2026HDSL: A Hierarchical Domain-Specific Language for Structured 3D Indoor Scene Generation and Localized Editing with LLM Agents8 Jun 2026
- 2026WorldCoder-Bench: Benchmarking Physically Grounded 3D World Synthesis1 Jun 2026
- 2026I-WebGenBench : Evaluating Interactivity in LLM-Generated Scientific Web Applications30 May 2026
- 2026Learning to Construct Practical Agentic Systems29 May 2026
- 2026Cookie-Bench: Continuous On-screen Key Interaction Evaluation for Web Generation28 May 2026
- 2026HTMLCure: Turning Browser Experience into State Guided Repair for Interactive HTML26 May 2026
- 2026SWE-Chain: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Chained Release-Level Package Upgrades14 May 2026
- 2026VulTriage: Triple-Path Context Augmentation for LLM-Based Vulnerability Detection10 May 2026
- 2026WebCompass: Towards Multimodal Web Coding Evaluation for Code Language Models20 Apr 2026
- 2026WebTestBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents towards End-to-End Automated Web Testing26 Mar 2026
- 2026WebVR: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs for WebPage Recreation from Videos via Human-Aligned Visual Rubrics11 Mar 2026
- 2026EfficientPosterGen: Semantic-aware Efficient Poster Generation via Token Compression and Accurate Violation Detection25 Feb 2026
- 2026FullStack-Agent: Enhancing Agentic Full-Stack Web Coding via Development-Oriented Testing and Repository Back-Translation3 Feb 2026
- 2026WebCoderBench: Benchmarking Web Application Generation with Comprehensive and Interpretable Evaluation Metrics5 Jan 2026
- 2025PyFi: Toward Pyramid-like Financial Image Understanding for VLMs via Adversarial Agents11 Dec 2025
- 2025FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback5 Dec 2025
- 2025Beyond Prototyping: Autonomous, Enterprise-Grade Frontend Development from Pixel to Production via a Specialized Multi-Agent Framework5 Dec 2025
- 2025JanusCoder: Towards a Foundational Visual-Programmatic Interface for Code Intelligence27 Oct 2025
- 2025TREAT: A Code LLMs Trustworthiness / Reliability Evaluation and Testing Framework20 Oct 2025
- 2025InteractScience: Programmatic and Visually-Grounded Evaluation of Interactive Scientific Demonstration Code Generation10 Oct 2025
- 2025Automatically Generating Web Applications from Requirements Via Multi-Agent Test-Driven Development29 Sep 2025
- 2025WebGen-Agent: Enhancing Interactive Website Generation with Multi-Level Feedback and Step-Level Reinforcement Learning26 Sep 2025
- 2025Benchmarking MLLM-based Web Understanding: Reasoning, Robustness and Safety26 Sep 2025
- 2025EfficientUICoder: A Bidirectional Token Compression Framework for Efficient MLLM-Based UI Code Generation15 Sep 2025
- 2025UI-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Design Capabilities of AI Text-to-App Tools28 Aug 2025
- 2025Semantic-aware Graph-guided Behavior Sequences Generation with Large Language Models for Smart Homes5 Aug 2025
- 2025ScreenCoder: Advancing Visual-to-Code Generation for Front-End Automation via Modular Multimodal Agents30 Jul 2025
- 20253D Software Synthesis Driven by Constraint-Expressive Intermediate Representation24 Jul 2025
- 2025SlideCoder: Layout-aware RAG-enhanced Hierarchical Slide Generation from Design9 Jun 2025
- 2025ScreenCoder: Advancing Visual-to-Code Generation for Front-End Automation via Modular Multimodal Agentscited by 26
- 2025Automatically Generating Web Applications from Requirements Via Multi-Agent Test-Driven Developmentcited by 7
- 2026SWE-Chain: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Chained Release-Level Package Upgradescited by 7
- 2026WebCompass: Towards Multimodal Web Coding Evaluation for Code Language Modelscited by 6
- 2026WebTestBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents towards End-to-End Automated Web Testingcited by 4
- 2026FullStack-Agent: Enhancing Agentic Full-Stack Web Coding via Development-Oriented Testing and Repository Back-Translationcited by 2
- 2026HDSL: A Hierarchical Domain-Specific Language for Structured 3D Indoor Scene Generation and Localized Editing with LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026RecreationWorld: Scalable and Verifiable Environments for Hybrid Computer-Use Agentscited by 1
- 2026Learning to Construct Practical Agentic Systemscited by 0
- 2026OpenHarmony Bench: Evaluating LLMs and Coding Agents on OpenHarmony App Developmentcited by 0
- 2026Enabling Creative Exploration for Vibe Design Agentscited by 0
- 2026WebUIProof: Benchmarking WebUI Code Generators with UI-Agent Execution Harnesscited by 0
- 2026WebUIProof: Benchmarking WebUI Code Generators with UI-Agent Execution Harness2 Oct 2026
- 2026RecreationWorld: Scalable and Verifiable Environments for Hybrid Computer-Use Agents18 Sep 2026
- 2026Enabling Creative Exploration for Vibe Design Agents14 Sep 2026
- 2026OpenHarmony Bench: Evaluating LLMs and Coding Agents on OpenHarmony App Development17 Aug 2026
- 2026HDSL: A Hierarchical Domain-Specific Language for Structured 3D Indoor Scene Generation and Localized Editing with LLM Agents8 Jun 2026
- 2026Learning to Construct Practical Agentic Systems29 May 2026
- 2026SWE-Chain: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Chained Release-Level Package Upgrades14 May 2026
- 2026WebCompass: Towards Multimodal Web Coding Evaluation for Code Language Models20 Apr 2026
- 2026WebTestBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents towards End-to-End Automated Web Testing26 Mar 2026
- 2026FullStack-Agent: Enhancing Agentic Full-Stack Web Coding via Development-Oriented Testing and Repository Back-Translation3 Feb 2026
- 2025Automatically Generating Web Applications from Requirements Via Multi-Agent Test-Driven Development29 Sep 2025
- 2025ScreenCoder: Advancing Visual-to-Code Generation for Front-End Automation via Modular Multimodal Agents30 Jul 2025
- 2026WebVR: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs for WebPage Recreation from Videos via Human-Aligned Visual Rubricscited by 8
- 2025PyFi: Toward Pyramid-like Financial Image Understanding for VLMs via Adversarial Agentscited by 0
- 2026CodeShrink: Adaptive Visual Compression for Efficient Multimodal Code Understandingcited by 0
- 2026Pattern over Pixels: Measuring Pattern Completion Bias in Multimodal Code Generationcited by 0
- 2026TaoD2C-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Industrial UI Code Generation Beyond Visual Fidelitycited by 0
- 2026TaoD2C-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Industrial UI Code Generation Beyond Visual Fidelity7 Oct 2026
- 2026Pattern over Pixels: Measuring Pattern Completion Bias in Multimodal Code Generation4 Aug 2026
- 2026CodeShrink: Adaptive Visual Compression for Efficient Multimodal Code Understanding31 Jul 2026
- 2026WebVR: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs for WebPage Recreation from Videos via Human-Aligned Visual Rubrics11 Mar 2026
- 2025PyFi: Toward Pyramid-like Financial Image Understanding for VLMs via Adversarial Agents11 Dec 2025
- 2025SlideCoder: Layout-aware RAG-enhanced Hierarchical Slide Generation from Designcited by 24
- 2026WebCoderBench: Benchmarking Web Application Generation with Comprehensive and Interpretable Evaluation Metricscited by 18
- 2025FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedbackcited by 14
- 2025JanusCoder: Towards a Foundational Visual-Programmatic Interface for Code Intelligencecited by 9
- 2026WorldCoder-Bench: Benchmarking Physically Grounded 3D World Synthesiscited by 9
- 2026Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligencecited by 6
- 20253D Software Synthesis Driven by Constraint-Expressive Intermediate Representationcited by 4
- 2025InteractScience: Programmatic and Visually-Grounded Evaluation of Interactive Scientific Demonstration Code Generationcited by 4
- 2025UI-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Design Capabilities of AI Text-to-App Toolscited by 3
- 2026Cookie-Bench: Continuous On-screen Key Interaction Evaluation for Web Generationcited by 3
- 2026I-WebGenBench : Evaluating Interactivity in LLM-Generated Scientific Web Applicationscited by 3
- 2026HTMLCure: Turning Browser Experience into State Guided Repair for Interactive HTMLcited by 2
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- 2026PrismaCoder: Pushing the Boundaries of Open Multimodal Code Intelligence through Decomposed Rubric Synthesis14 Oct 2026
- 2026Pixels or Code? Benchmarking Instruction-Guided Visual Artifact Operation12 Oct 2026
- 2026AUV-Bench: Aesthetic Understanding and Generation Evaluation for User Interfaces28 Sep 2026
- 2026Editable Visual Design3 Sep 2026
- 2026From Visual Widgets to UI Code: Efficient Tool-Grounded Generation12 Aug 2026
- 2026VideoVIBE: A Video-Grounded Diagnostic Benchmark for One-Shot Interactive Website Generation10 Aug 2026
- 2026UI2App: Benchmarking Visual Interaction Inference in Executable Web Application Generation7 Jul 2026
- 2026Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligence14 Jun 2026
- 2026WorldCoder-Bench: Benchmarking Physically Grounded 3D World Synthesis1 Jun 2026
- 2026I-WebGenBench : Evaluating Interactivity in LLM-Generated Scientific Web Applications30 May 2026
- 2026Cookie-Bench: Continuous On-screen Key Interaction Evaluation for Web Generation28 May 2026
- 2026HTMLCure: Turning Browser Experience into State Guided Repair for Interactive HTML26 May 2026
12 newest of 23 All 23 (JSON)
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