Papers › Learning to Infer Graphics Programs from Hand-Drawn Images

Learning to Infer Graphics Programs from Hand-Drawn Images

30 Jul 2017ICLR 2018 1arXiv:1707.09627archive 2025-07-28

Kevin Ellis, Daniel Ritchie, Armando Solar-Lezama, Joshua B. Tenenbaum

We introduce a model that learns to convert simple hand drawings into graphics programs written in a subset of \LaTeX. The model combines techniques from deep learning and program synthesis. We learn a convolutional neural network that proposes plausible drawing primitives that explain an image. These drawing primitives are like a trace of the set of primitive commands issued by a graphics program. We learn a model that uses program synthesis techniques to recover a graphics program from that trace. These programs have constructs like variable bindings, iterative loops, or simple kinds of conditionals. With a graphics program in hand, we can correct errors made by the deep network, measure similarity between drawings by use of similar high-level geometric structures, and extrapolate drawings. Taken together these results are a step towards agents that induce useful, human-readable programs from perceptual input.

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