  Sketching out Graphical User Interface (GUI) layout is part of the pipeline
of designing a GUI and a crucial task for the success of a software
application. Arranging all components inside a GUI layout manually is a
time-consuming task. In order to assist designers, we developed a method named
GUILGET to automatically generate GUI layouts from positional constraints
represented as GUI arrangement graphs (GUI-AGs). The goal is to support the
initial step of GUI design by producing realistic and diverse GUI layouts. The
existing image layout generation techniques often cannot incorporate GUI design
constraints. Thus, GUILGET needs to adapt existing techniques to generate GUI
layouts that obey to constraints specific to GUI designs. GUILGET is based on
transformers in order to capture the semantic in relationships between elements
from GUI-AG. Moreover, the model learns constraints through the minimization of
losses responsible for placing each component inside its parent layout, for not
letting components overlap if they are inside the same parent, and for
component alignment. Our experiments, which are conducted on the CLAY dataset,
reveal that our model has the best understanding of relationships from GUI-AG
and has the best performances in most of evaluation metrics. Therefore, our
work contributes to improved GUI layout generation by proposing a novel method
that effectively accounts for the constraints on GUI elements and paves the
road for a more efficient GUI design pipeline.
