RAP: A Dataset for Paper-to-Poster Generation
via Declarative Markup from Human-Crafted Exemplars
Turn scientific papers into editable academic posters.
Retrieve a real template, adapt its content, and refine the details.
Abstract
Making a conference poster is visual coding in miniature: an entire paper must be compressed onto a single page, which exercises summarization, visual design, and code implementation at once, using nothing beyond the paper itself. Yet benchmarks for this task in the context of visual coding remain scarce: existing resources are small and annotated only with layout boxes, so evaluation must fall back on VLM-as-judge or human checklists rather than objective render-and-compare, and the generation methods they support design layouts from scratch, leaving human-crafted posters unusable as either a retrievable design library or as verified supervision.
We introduce RAP (Reconstruct A Poster), a dataset and benchmark for paper-to-poster generation as a visual coding task. RAP contains 25K+ verified paper-poster pairs from various Machine Learning conferences published between 2022 and 2026, annotated with a three-level content taxonomy, plus a held-out benchmark of 150 test papers each paired with its human poster. A fully automated derendering pipeline turns each poster into styled HTML/CSS of typed, refillable slots, so every sample is a paper-poster-markup triplet verifiable by rendering against the source poster.
The corpus serves both inference and training: PosterRAG, a training-free multi-agent pipeline, retrieves an exemplar and refills its slots without touching layout or styling, while an SFT+RL recipe trains a dedicated model from the same triplets. An online demo is available at https://reconstruct-a-poster.github.io/.
Method
RAP is built on PosterReverse-25K — 25,435 paper–poster pairs derendered into structured HTML templates via layout detection, font-size estimation, design captioning, and MLLM reconstruction. On top of it, we explore two applications: template retrieval-based poster generation and post-training for vision-language models.
Beyond retrieval, the dataset also enables post-training: paper text and assets are extracted, design and layout instructions are derived from reference posters, and a VLM is fine-tuned with SFT followed by rendering-aware RL (GRPO) under rule-based and VLM-based rewards.
