PixelBench: Can LLMs Understand and Generate Images Pixel by Pixel?

Haoquan Zhang, Feiyang Liu, Juanxi Tian, Wanhua Li, Haodong Duan +1

Large language models (LLMs) can generate visual assets through text-based formats such as SVG and CAD, but these symbolic representations describe images using high-level primitives rather than explicit raster values. We ask whether LLMs can instead generate pixel images directly through their existing vocabulary, without a learned image tokenizer or decoder. We introduce PixelBench, a benchmark for text-to-pixel (T2P) and image-to-pixel (I2P) generation across multiple resolutions, together with a complementary pixel-understanding evaluation. Models generate an RGB color palette followed by a grid of indices specifying the palette color of each output pixel. In T2P, the strongest models produce recognizable images directly from text. In I2P, the strongest models outperform palette-matched downsampling and specialized pixelization algorithms at low resolutions. Pixel-understanding performance correlates strongly with generation performance. A resolution-scaling study shows that pixel-generation performance often improves initially before declining at high resolutions. Finally, we introduce Pixel Reconstruction Tuning (PRT), which augments visual instruction tuning with…