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.
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.
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.