AI models excel at creating content, but typically render it with static, predefined interfaces. Specifically, the output of LLMs is often a markdown "wall of text". Generative UI is a long standing promise, where the model generates not just the content, but the interface itself. Until now, Generative UI was not possible in a robust fashion. We demonstrate that when properly prompted and equipped with the right set of tools, a modern LLM can robustly produce high quality custom UIs for virtually any prompt. When ignoring generation speed, results generated by our implementation are overwhelmingly preferred by humans over the standard LLM markdown output. In fact, while the results generated by our implementation are worse than those crafted by human experts, they are at least comparable in 50% of cases. We show that this ability for robust Generative UI is emergent, with substantial improvements from previous models. We also create and release PAGEN, a novel dataset of expert-crafted results to aid in evaluating Generative UI implementations, as well as the results of our system for future comparisons. Interactive examples can be seen at https://generativeui.github.io
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Results from our implementation (see generativeui.github.io ).
Figure 2: A high level system overview.
Figure 3: Screenshots of Generative UI results with “Classic” styling.
Figure 4: Screenshots of Generative UI results with “Wizard Green” styling.
Format
ELO Score
Website (human expert)
1800.3
Generative UI
1736.2
Generative Markdown
1437.7
Website (top search result)
1352.2
Generative Text
1173.7
Table 1: ELO scores for user preference (LMArena).
Method
Custom Website (human expert)
Generative UI
Markdown
Website (top result)
Text
Website (experts)
-
50.0%
90.6%
91.1%
97.3%
Generative UI
35.3%
-
82.8%
90%
97.0%
Markdown
6.1%
13.9%
-
44.4%
81.1%
Website (search)
6.7%
6.7%
52.2%
-
58.9%
Text
2.7%
3.0%
1.1%
38.3%
-
Table 2: Pairwise user preferences wins (LMArena). Generative UI strongly preferred except vs. human experts.
Backbone Model
Elo Score
Output Errors
Gemini 3
1706.7
0%
Gemini 2.5 Pro
1653.6
0%
Gemini 2.5 Flash
1623.9
0%
Gemini 2.0 Flash
1332.9
29%
Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite
1183.0
60%
Table 3: Model Performance Comparison (LMArena)
Backbone Model
Elo Score
Output Errors
Gemini 3
1739.31
0%
Gemini 2.5 Pro
1578.53
0%
Gemini 2.5 Flash
1577.74
0%
Gemini 2.0 Flash
1361.75
0%
Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite
1242.67
1%
Table 4: Model Performance Comparison (Info-Seeking)
Prompt Ablation
ELO Score
Full Prompt
1553.23
Minimal Prompt
1496.00
No Philosophy
1450.77
Table 5: Effect of Prompting Strategy (LMArena)
Appendix figures & tables7 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 5: "Explain fractals" generated web-app.
Figure 6: "History of Time Keeping Devices" generated web-app.
Figure 7: "Memory Game" generated web-app.
Figure 8: "Basketball Math" generated web-app.
Format
ELO Score
Website (human expert)
1821.5
Generative UI
1727.3
Website (top search result)
1424.3
Generative Markdown
1385.5
Generative Text
1141.4
Appendix
Table 6: ELO scores for user preference (Info-Seeking).
Method
Custom Website (human expert)
Generative UI
Markdown
Website (top result)
Text
Website (experts)
-
55.5%
98.0%
79.0%
100.0%
Generative UI
30.0%
-
90.5%
73.5%
95.5%
Markdown
0.0%
6.5%
-
36.0%
84.0%
Website (search)
4.0%
19.0%
60.0%
-
70.5%
Text
0.0%
3.5%
13.5%
24.0%
-
Appendix
Table 7: Pairwise user preferences wins (Info-Seeking). Generative UI strongly preferred except vs. human experts.
Prompt Ablation
ELO Score
Full Prompt
1551.34
Minimal Prompt
1488.27
No Philosophy
1460.39
Appendix
Table 8: Effect of Prompting Strategy (Info-Seeking)
Large language models can generate interactive web interfaces, but reliable generative UI requires maintaining an executable artifact as user requests evolve. We introduce EvoGenUI-Bench, a benchmark for multi-turn interface maintenance comprising 150 five-turn tasks and 750 turns across three scenarios: information presentation, executable interaction, and tool-grounded external state. We execute generated artifacts in a browser and evaluate them using screenshots, source and DOM evidence, actor traces, and runtime logs. Beyond turn-level and episode-level success, we measure cross-turn retention with Adjacent Pass Retention. Across eight models, even the strongest achieves 74.9% Turn Pass while completing only 37.3% of five-turn episodes; APR further falls to 52.4% on tool-grounded tasks. Diagnostic analysis shows that presentation failures center on information architecture, interaction failures on derived-state propagation and affordance binding, and tool-grounded failures additionally involve external-state grounding and requirement decomposition. These results reframe generative UI evaluation from judging isolated outputs to testing whether interface behavior, derived state, external state, and assistant claims remain synchronized as the artifact evolves.
Generative UI (GenUI) lets large language models synthesize a complete, renderable interface directly from a natural-language instruction, but evaluating the quality of what they generate remains an open problem. Human evaluation is costly and rater-variant, while LLM-as-a-judge is scalable but reflects only a single implicit viewpoint, unable to capture how different populations of real users actually perceive the same interface. We propose the Evidence-Grounded, Social-Weighted Persona Panel (ESPP), a three-stage GenUI evaluation method in which a panel of psychologically diverse, evidence-grounded personas independently rates a screenshot, exchanges opinions under a trait-derived, semantically-gated bounded-confidence mechanism, and is aggregated via Delphi-inspired social weighting into a single judgment. ESPP tracks human judgment substantially more closely than a naive single-pass judge, raising Pearson r from 0.716 to 0.922, and a prompt-ensemble control recovers only about a third of this gap, isolating genuine persona and evidence grounding as the dominant source of improvement. Beyond this fidelity gain, retaining each panelist's individual rating further reveals that user subgroups agree on overall model rankings yet diverge sharply on specific rating dimensions, a structural disagreement a single homogeneous judge would systematically erase. The codes are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/ESPP.
Zheng Wu, Yibo Luo, Pu Zhang +2
School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 2ByteDance Inc
Most human-agent interaction today remains text-based. Natural language can impose cognitive overload, ambiguity, information chaos, and slow input for complex tasks; ephemeral generative UIs can present structured information and guide users toward task completion. We propose GenUI-Harness, a multi-agent harness pairing a Tool Agent for information retrieval and task execution with a GUI Coder Agent that identifies ambiguities and generates front-end code for structured interfaces. Training the coder with reinforcement learning is challenging: verifiable rewards for interactive UI generation require costly execution, while LLM-as-a-Judge rewards are prone to reward hacking. We address the first challenge with Dynamic UX, a lightweight package for dynamic interaction and reward collection in a single sandbox, and the second with Reward Auditor, a meta-reward mechanism that monitors reward distributions and distills diagnostic patterns into a shared rubric and scoring specification. We introduce UI-TAU Bench, a benchmark for active human-agent interaction through generated UI code, built on 10 real-world domain databases constructed from public data sources and based on Tau-Bench tool-use settings, with Lite (300 tasks) and Full (1,000 tasks) splits. GenUI-Harness achieves an average Pass@3 gain of 4.48 percentage points over smolagents on Lite. Training with GenUI-Harness improves a 4B backbone from 9.33% to 58.00% Pass@3, outperforming larger frontier models such as Claude Opus 5 (46.67%). GenUI-Harness also remains robust on ambiguous and non-ambiguous queries. In a reviewer survey comparing communication channels, generated UIs reduce average dialogue rounds from 3.4 to 1.2. These results show that data-aware generative interfaces can support effective task completion and reduce dialogue rounds in evaluated database-backed workflows.
Xiaolong Li, Xiaohan Xu, Jinyang Li +5
The University of Hong Kong · The BIRD Team · Microsoft Research