AutoIllustrate: Automated Generation of Polished and Editable Paper Figures

Learn how to generate publication-grade academic figures from text. This talk details a two-step process for creating editable `.drawio` files and polished PNGs, addressing common issues with direct diffusion model generation.

Claude Code CLI Draw OpenAI API Google Gemini API MathJax

Overview

AutoIllustrate is a command-line tool that turns a methodology brief (a paper section, a system description, or a verbal sketch) into a publication-grade academic figure of 1 to 3 panels. Each run produces two deliverables: (1) an editable .drawio file and (2) an enhanced, ready-to-publish image.

Live, I’ll walk through the full pipeline run on a real paper section, stage by stage:

the agent deciding the layout and panel count,
each panel rendered as a draw.io diagram,
the vision-model audit-and-repair loop,
deterministic composition of the panels into a single file,
the optional image-model restyle into a camera-ready PNG, followed by the verification and repair steps.

Tech stack