Papers for

graphic design tool developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Transformer blocks improve image generation quality with repeated use

LoopREG: Representation Supervision Enables Test-Time Recurrent Depth in Diffusion Transformers

Abstract: Reusing Transformer blocks offers a way to increase diffusion-model computation at test time, but naive recurrence can degrade generation beyond its training depth. We introduce LoopREG, a representation-supervised recurrent diffusion Transformer that repeatedly applies a shared block at the state supervised by a pretrained visual encoder. Alignment is applied after the final recurrent visit during training; inference extends the same learned operator to additional visits. On ImageNet 256 x 256, LoopREG reduces SiT-B/2 FID from the local REG baseline's 15.08 to 4.91 at 400K training steps, a 67.41% reduction. Within a checkpoint trained with two visits, one extra inference visit improves FID from 14.71 to 5.34 with unchanged weights. The benefit persists on SiT-L/2 and SiT-XL/2. Controlled interventions show that useful recurrence follows the location of representation supervision, while REPA alignment produces a smaller extrapolation benefit. These results make representation-supervised recurrence a practical route to improving diffusion generation through additional inference depth.

Tue 13 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating images using AI models can be made better by running certain parts of the model multiple times. However, just repeating these parts without care often makes the images worse. The authors introduce LoopREG, a method that supervises these repeated parts using a visual encoder to keep the image quality high even with more repetitions. Tests on a popular image dataset show big improvements in image quality using LoopREG compared to other methods. This approach could help AI generate clearer images by applying the same model parts multiple times during creation.
Open → 2610.17877v1

Windfoil delivers fast and accurate vector graphics rendering on GPUs

Windfoil: Closed-Form Coverage for Real-Time and Differentiable Vector Graphics

Abstract: We present Windfoil, a GPU-friendly algorithm that treats rasterisation and differentiable vector graphics as two sides of the same problem by evaluating the box-filtered winding number of quadratic Bézier contours in closed form. We implement this in WebGPU, allowing it to run across a range of environments, including a web browser on a consumer laptop, and apply the system to real-time 2D rendering, high-resolution rasterisation for print media, and a differentiable renderer. We compare our renderer against Skia, a production-grade engine, and Slug, a popular GPU rasterisation algorithm for games and real-time applications, measuring fidelity to a reference box-filtered coverage. Our renderer matches the reference more closely than either, at performance comparable to Slug. We also compare our optimiser against DiffVG and Bézier Splatting, where it reaches equivalent or better reconstruction quality at a fraction of the per-step cost, scaling to tens of thousands of shapes at interactive rates.

Thu 1 OctGraphicsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Drawing smooth shapes on screens usually involves complex calculations and approximations that can be slow or less accurate. The authors created Windfoil, a new method that exactly measures how much of the shape covers each pixel using math formulas made for GPUs. This method works quickly enough for real-time uses and also helps with tasks that need precise shape edits. Windfoil matches or beats existing tools in quality and speed while running on common devices like web browsers.
Open → 2610.02468v1

Visual language models use general heads to read and describe images

Using OCR Heads to Verbalize Image Semantics

Abstract: How do VLMs map from pixels to semantics? To understand this general question, we focus on a narrow one: studying how VLMs perform optical character recognition (OCR). Across four models, we identify attention heads causally necessary for OCR, and discover that these are in fact general-purpose heads that output interpretable semantic features across all image tokens. For example, pointing these heads at an image token containing the word "bike" causes Qwen3-VL-8B to output "bike," but pointing them at a bird wing causes the model to output the token "feathers." We collapse these heads' attention weights into a single verbalization lens transformation that reveals interpretable semantic features in hidden states across all layers. When combined with projection to vocabulary space, we can obtain interpretable labels starting from layer 0, showing that image representations are in fact aligned with language in early layers. We find that we can also use the inverse of this transformation to edit non-word concepts, e.g., replacing a tractor with a revolver in a naturalistic image, providing causal evidence that this subspace is useful for more than just OCR. Our results are an example of how the study of specific mechanisms can shed light on broader interpretability problems.

Wed 16 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Visual language models (VLMs) turn pictures into words, but how they do this is not fully known. This paper looks closely at how these models recognize words printed in images using special parts called OCR heads. The authors found these heads are actually general tools that help identify meaningful features in images, not just text. By understanding and changing these heads, it's possible to both read words in images and even edit image content in meaningful ways.
Open → 2609.18823v1