Agentic Model Predictive Questioning Control in Visual Design

Recent Large Language Model–based approaches for clarifying visual design largely focus on selecting questions that better uncover user intent, but often overlook the cognitive burden imposed on users—i.e., the effort required to interpret and answer these questions—which is crucial for effective human–agent interaction. We propose Agentic Model Predictive Questioning Control (A-MPQC), a test-time framework that reduces user interaction burden while improving visual design alignment by formulating multi-round clarification as trajectory optimization with receding-horizon replanning, allowing the agent to revise its questioning strategy as feedback arrives. We further introduce lookahead question plans to reduce ambiguity early, and a lightweight respond-or-reject surrogate reward to steer questions toward lower-burden formats (e.g., yes/no). Experiments on webpage and ad banner generation benchmarks show that A-MPQC not only produces better designs but also achieves lower user-interaction cost across diverse baselines—including fixed-format strategies (e.g., multiple-choice and open-ended) and a retrieval-augmented baseline—without retraining. Overall, our work explicitly formulates and optimizes human cognitive burden jointly with final design alignment, opening new opportunities for advancing human–agent interaction in design.