NL2Dashboard: A Lightweight and Controllable Framework for Generating Dashboards with LLMs

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in generating standalone charts, synthesizing comprehensive dashboards remains a formidable challenge. Existing end-to-end paradigms, which typically treat dashboard generation as a direct code generation task (e.g., raw HTML), suffer from two fundamental limitations: representation redundancy due to massive tokens spent on visual rendering, and low controllability caused by the entanglement of analytical reasoning and presentation. To address these challenges, we propose NL2Dashboard, a lightweight framework grounded in the principle of Analysis-Presentation Decoupling. We introduce a structured intermediate representation (IR) that encapsulates the dashboard's content, layout, and visual elements. Therefore, it confines the LLM's role to data analysis and intent translation, while offloading visual synthesis to a deterministic rendering engine. Building upon this framework, we develop a multi-agent system in which the IR-driven algorithm is instantiated as a suite of tools. Comprehensive experiments conducted with this system demonstrate that NL2Dashboard significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse domains, achieving superior visual quality, significantly higher token efficiency, and precise controllability in both generation and modification tasks.