AutomaTikZ: Text-Guided Synthesis of Scientific Vector Graphics with TikZ

TL;DR

AutomaTikZ introduces a novel approach for generating scientific vector graphics by leveraging TikZ as an intermediate representation, enabling large language models to produce high-quality, human-readable figures aligned with captions.

Contribution

The paper presents DaTikZ, a large-scale TikZ dataset, and fine-tunes LLaMA and CLiMA models for text-guided scientific figure synthesis, outperforming existing models in quality and alignment.

Findings

CLiMA outperforms GPT-4 and Claude 2 in similarity to human figures.

Models generalize well without memorization.

Generated figures are less simplistic than those from commercial models.

Abstract

Generating bitmap graphics from text has gained considerable attention, yet for scientific figures, vector graphics are often preferred. Given that vector graphics are typically encoded using low-level graphics primitives, generating them directly is difficult. To address this, we propose the use of TikZ, a well-known abstract graphics language that can be compiled to vector graphics, as an intermediate representation of scientific figures. TikZ offers human-oriented, high-level commands, thereby facilitating conditional language modeling with any large language model. To this end, we introduce DaTikZ, the first large-scale TikZ dataset consisting of 120k TikZ drawings aligned with captions. We fine-tune LLaMA on DaTikZ, as well as our new model CLiMA, which augments LLaMA with multimodal CLIP embeddings. In both human and automatic evaluation, CLiMA and LLaMA outperform commercial GPT-4 and Claude 2 in terms of similarity to human-created figures, with CLiMA additionally improving text-image alignment. Our detailed analysis shows that all models generalize well and are not susceptible to memorization. GPT-4 and Claude 2, however, tend to generate more simplistic figures compared to both humans and our models. We make our framework, AutomaTikZ, along with model weights and datasets, publicly available.