Portal UX Agent -- A Plug-and-Play Engine for Rendering UIs from Natural Language Specifications

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Portal UX Agent, a system that combines language models with deterministic rendering to generate reliable, safe, and adaptable user interfaces from natural language specifications, with a comprehensive evaluation framework.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid approach that balances flexibility and control in UI generation, integrating high-level planning with vetted component assembly and a mixed-methods evaluation.

Findings

Reliable UI generation across multiple domains

High semantic alignment and visual quality

Effective balance between expressiveness and safety

Abstract

The rapid appearance of large language models (LLMs) has led to systems that turn natural-language intent into real user interfaces (UIs). Free-form code generation maximizes expressiveness but often hurts reliability, security, and design-system compliance. In contrast, fully static UIs are easy to govern but lack adaptability. We present the Portal UX Agent, a practical middle way that makes bounded generation work: an LLM plans the UI at a high level, and a deterministic renderer assembles the final interface from a vetted set of components and layout templates. The agent maps intents to a typed composition-template and component specifications-constrained by a schema. This enables auditability, reuse, and safety while preserving flexibility. We also introduce a mixed-methods evaluation framework that combines automatic checks (coverage, property fidelity, layout, accessibility, performance) with an LLM-as-a-Judge rubric to assess semantic alignment and visual polish. Experiments on multi-domain portal scenarios show that the Portal UX Agent reliably turns intent into coherent, usable UIs and performs well on compositionality and clarity. This work advances agentic UI design by combining model-driven representations, plug-and-play rendering, and structured evaluation, paving the way for controllable and trustworthy UI generation.