@inproceedings{wu-etal-2026-looks,
title = "Looks Right, Works Right: A Project-Level Benchmark for Multi-Screen Mobile App Generation",
author = "Wu, Fan and
Gao, Cuiyun and
Huang, Yiming and
Xiao, Yang and
Chen, Yujia and
Liao, Qing",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2650/",
pages = "60294--60319",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Recent multimodal large language models can convert visual designs directly into executable code, but real mobile products require multiple screenshots to become a buildable codebase with shared components and working navigation. This project-level setting exposes three limits of existing design-to-code benchmarks: they focus on single-page generation rather than complete codebases, cannot evaluate cross-page navigation, and do not measure project-wide maintainability. We introduce MobileForge, the first benchmark for project-level multi-screen mobile app generation, comprising 29 real mobile apps, 309 human-reviewed screens, structured page-relationship annotations, and 701 navigation test specifications. MobileForge supports five-axis evaluation of build, navigation, visual fidelity, code maintainability, and efficiency. We also propose state-isolated navigation testing to avoid cascading failures in navigation evaluation and an anchor-referenced list-wise visual evaluation protocol to improve visual-judge reliability. Across 174 end-to-end runs on six frontier multimodal LLMs, current models can build mobile-app projects that compile and reach the correct pages, but interactive navigation remains unreliable and visual fidelity and maintainability still lag. The benchmark and supporting materials are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MobileForge-E2E5/}."
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<abstract>Recent multimodal large language models can convert visual designs directly into executable code, but real mobile products require multiple screenshots to become a buildable codebase with shared components and working navigation. This project-level setting exposes three limits of existing design-to-code benchmarks: they focus on single-page generation rather than complete codebases, cannot evaluate cross-page navigation, and do not measure project-wide maintainability. We introduce MobileForge, the first benchmark for project-level multi-screen mobile app generation, comprising 29 real mobile apps, 309 human-reviewed screens, structured page-relationship annotations, and 701 navigation test specifications. MobileForge supports five-axis evaluation of build, navigation, visual fidelity, code maintainability, and efficiency. We also propose state-isolated navigation testing to avoid cascading failures in navigation evaluation and an anchor-referenced list-wise visual evaluation protocol to improve visual-judge reliability. Across 174 end-to-end runs on six frontier multimodal LLMs, current models can build mobile-app projects that compile and reach the correct pages, but interactive navigation remains unreliable and visual fidelity and maintainability still lag. The benchmark and supporting materials are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MobileForge-E2E5/.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Looks Right, Works Right: A Project-Level Benchmark for Multi-Screen Mobile App Generation
%A Wu, Fan
%A Gao, Cuiyun
%A Huang, Yiming
%A Xiao, Yang
%A Chen, Yujia
%A Liao, Qing
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F wu-etal-2026-looks
%X Recent multimodal large language models can convert visual designs directly into executable code, but real mobile products require multiple screenshots to become a buildable codebase with shared components and working navigation. This project-level setting exposes three limits of existing design-to-code benchmarks: they focus on single-page generation rather than complete codebases, cannot evaluate cross-page navigation, and do not measure project-wide maintainability. We introduce MobileForge, the first benchmark for project-level multi-screen mobile app generation, comprising 29 real mobile apps, 309 human-reviewed screens, structured page-relationship annotations, and 701 navigation test specifications. MobileForge supports five-axis evaluation of build, navigation, visual fidelity, code maintainability, and efficiency. We also propose state-isolated navigation testing to avoid cascading failures in navigation evaluation and an anchor-referenced list-wise visual evaluation protocol to improve visual-judge reliability. Across 174 end-to-end runs on six frontier multimodal LLMs, current models can build mobile-app projects that compile and reach the correct pages, but interactive navigation remains unreliable and visual fidelity and maintainability still lag. The benchmark and supporting materials are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MobileForge-E2E5/.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2650/
%P 60294-60319
Markdown (Informal)
[Looks Right, Works Right: A Project-Level Benchmark for Multi-Screen Mobile App Generation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2650/) (Wu et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL