APEX: Academic Poster Editing Agentic Expert

Chengxin Shi, Qinnan Cai, Zeyuan Chen, Long Zeng, Yibo Zhao, Jing Yu, Jianxiang Yu, Xiang Li


Abstract
Designing academic posters is a labor-intensive process requiring the precise balance of high-density content and sophisticated layout. While existing paper-to-poster generation methods automate initial drafting, they are typically single-pass and non-interactive, often fail to align with complex, subjective user intent. To bridge this gap, we propose APEX (**A**cademic **P**oster **E**diting agentic e**X**pert), the first agentic framework for interactive academic poster editing, supporting fine-grained control with robust multi-level API-based editing and a review-and-adjustment mechanism. In addition, we introduce APEX-Bench, the first systematic benchmark comprising 514 academic poster editing instructions, categorized by a multi-dimensional taxonomy including operation type, difficulty, and abstraction level, constructed via reference-guided and reference-free strategies to ensure realism and diversity. We further establish a multi-dimensional VLM-as-a-judge evaluation protocol to assess instruction fulfillment, modification scope, and visual consistency harmony. Experimental results demonstrate that APEX significantly outperforms baseline methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Breesiu/APEX.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2283
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
48904–48932
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2283/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chengxin Shi, Qinnan Cai, Zeyuan Chen, Long Zeng, Yibo Zhao, Jing Yu, Jianxiang Yu, and Xiang Li. 2026. APEX: Academic Poster Editing Agentic Expert. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 48904–48932, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
APEX: Academic Poster Editing Agentic Expert (Shi et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2283.pdf