From Handcrafted to Generative: RLVR-Optimized Icon Generation for Alexa+

arXiv:2611.06123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alexa+ devices with screens display animated icons during conversations to visually reinforce what is being said. The original set of these icons was hand-drawn by designers one at a time, a process that produces polished results but is time-consuming and cannot scale to the range of topics encountered in open-ended conversation. We describe an automated pipeline, deployed in production, that generates these vectorised animated icons from a text description alone and surfaces relevant animations to customers based on their ongoing conversation. The pipeline decomposes icon creation into a sequence of stages (image generation, semantic decomposition, vectorisation, styling, and animation). Its quality is determined at the very first of these, image generation, on which every downstream stage depends. We therefore focus on improving this first and most critical stage. Because the icons are rendered on small display canvases under strict design guidelines, generations are often unsuitable for production. Supervised fine-tuning is not viable, as no dataset of line-art icons exists under these constraints. Instead, we design objective verifiers that automatically flag generations violating the design guidelines, and use them to fine-tune a flow matching image generation model via reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). The fine-tuned model raises the pass rate from 15.7% to 58.7% (3.7x) under a VLM judge that is independent of the reward model. Both the trained model and the verifier are deployed in the production pipeline, where the verifier also serves as the automated quality gate before final design review.