ICLR 2026poster0 citations

Presenting a Paper is an Art: Self-Improvement Aesthetic Agents for Academic Presentations

Chengzhi Liu, Yuzhe YANG, Kaiwen Zhou, Zhen Zhang, Yue Fan, Yanan Xie, Peng Qi, Xin Eric Wang

Abstract

The promotion of academic papers has become an important means of enhancing research visibility. where the appeal of dissemination largely determines its effectiveness. However, existing automated methods struggle limited storytelling, insufficient aesthetic quality, and constrained self-adjustment, making it difficult to achieve efficient and engaging dissemination. At the heart of those challenges is a simple principle: *there is no way to improve it when you cannot evaluate it right*. To address this, we introduce **EvoPresent**, a self-improvement agent framework that unifies coherent narratives, aesthetic-aware designs, and realistic presentation delivery via virtual characters. Central to EvoPresent is **PresAesth**, a multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aesthetic model that provides reliable aesthetic scoring, defect adjustment, and comparative feedback, enabling iterative self-improvement even under limited aesthetic training data. To systematically evaluate the methods, we introduce **EvoPresent Benchmark**, a comprehensive benchmark comprising: *Presentation Generation Quality*, built on 650 top-tier AI conference papers with multimodal resources (slides, videos and scripts) to assess both content and design; and *Aesthetic Awareness*, consisting of 2,000 slide pairs with varying aesthetic levels, supporting joint training and evaluation on scoring, defect adjustment, and comparison. Our findings highlight that (i) High-quality feedback is essential for agent self-improvement, while initial capability alone does not guarantee effective self-correction. (ii) Automated generation pipelines exhibit a trade-off between visual design and content construction. (iii) Multi-task RL training shows stronger generalization in aesthetic awareness tasks.

Presentation GenerationSelf-improvementAI for Academic ResearchHuman-Agent Interaction
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
liu2026presenting,
title={Presenting a Paper is an Art: Self-Improvement Aesthetic Agents for Academic Presentations},
author={Chengzhi Liu and Yuzhe YANG and Kaiwen Zhou and Zhen Zhang and Yue Fan and Yanan Xie and Peng Qi and Xin Eric Wang},
booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=8NXCwNjFNR}
}
Presenting a Paper is an Art: Self-Improvement Aesthetic Agents for Academic Presentations · ICLR 2026