Pixtral-12B-2409-StarFlow

Model Card for ServiceNow/Pixtral-12B-2409-StarFlow

Pixtral-12B-2409-StarFlow is a vision-language model finetuned for structured workflow generation from sketch images. It translates hand-drawn or computer-generated workflow diagrams into structured JSON workflows, including triggers, flow logic, and actions.

Model Details

Model Description

Pixtral-12B-2409-StarFlow is part of the StarFlow framework for automating workflow creation. It extends Pixtral-12B with domain-specific finetuning on workflow diagrams, enabling accurate sketch-to-workflow generation.

• Developed by: ServiceNow Research
• Model type: Transformer-based Vision-Language Model (VLM)
• Language(s) (NLP): English
• License: Apache 2.0
• Finetuned from model: Pixtral-12B

Model Sources

• Repository: ServiceNow/Pixtral-12B-2409-StarFlow
• Paper: StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images;

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Uses

Direct Use

• Translating sketches of workflows (hand-drawn, whiteboard, or digital diagrams) into JSON structured workflows.
• Supporting workflow automation in enterprise platforms by removing the need for manual low-code configuration.

Downstream Use

• Integration into enterprise low-code platforms for rapid prototyping of workflows by users.
• Used in automation migration pipelines, e.g., converting legacy workflow screenshots into JSON representations.

Out-of-Scope Use

• General-purpose vision-language tasks (e.g., image captioning, OCR).
• Use on domains outside workflow automation (e.g., arbitrary diagram-to-code).
• Real-time handwriting recognition (StarFlow focuses on structured workflow translation, not raw OCR).

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Bias, Risks, and Limitations

• Limited generalization: Finetuned models perform poorly on out-of-distribution diagrams from unfamiliar platforms.
• Sensitivity to input style: Whiteboard/handwritten sketches degrade performance compared to digital or UI-rendered workflows.
• Component naming mismatches: Model may mispredict action definitions (e.g., “create_user” vs. “create_a_user”), leading to execution errors.
• Evaluation gap: Current metrics don’t always reflect execution correctness of generated workflows.

Recommendations

Users should:

• Validate outputs before deployment.
• Be cautious with handwritten/ambiguous sketches.
• Consider supplementing with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or tool grounding for robustness.

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How to Get Started with the Model

from transformers import AutoProcessor, LlavaForConditionalGeneration
from PIL import Image

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("ServiceNow/Pixtral-12B-2409-StarFlow")
model = LlavaForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("ServiceNow/Pixtral-12B-2409-StarFlow")

image = Image.open("workflow_sketch.png")
inputs = processor(images=image, text="Generate workflow JSON", return_tensors="pt")

outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_length=4096)
workflow_json = processor.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True)

print(workflow_json)

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Training Details

Training Data

The model was trained using the ServiceNow/BigDocs-Sketch2Flow dataset, which includes the following data distribution:

• Synthetic (12,376 Graphviz-generated diagrams)
• Manual (3,035 sketches hand-drawn by annotators)
• Digital (2,613 diagrams drawn using software)
• Whiteboard (484 sketches drawn on whiteboard / blackboard)
• User Interface (373 screenshots from ServiceNow Flow Designer)

Training Procedure

Preprocessing

• Synthetic workflows generated via heuristics (Scheduled Loop, IF/ELSE, FOREACH, etc.).
• Annotators recreated flows in digital, manual, and whiteboard formats.

Training Hyperparameters

• Optimizer: AdamW with β=(0.95,0.999), lr=2e-5, weight decay=1e-6.
• Scheduler: cosine learning rate with 30 warmup steps.
• Early stopping based on validation loss.
• Precision: bf16 mixed-precision.
• Sequence length: up to 32k tokens.

Speeds, Sizes, Times

• Trained with 16× NVIDIA H100 80GB GPUs across two nodes.
• Full Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) training, no CPU offloading.

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Evaluation

Testing Data

Same dataset distribution as training: synthetic, manual, digital, whiteboard, UI-rendered workflows.

Factors

• Source of sample (synthetic, manual, UI, etc.)
• Orientation (portrait vs. landscape diagrams)
• Resolution (small <400k pixels, medium, large >1M pixels)

Metrics

All Evaluation metrics can be found in the official StarFlow repo.

• Flow Similarity (FlowSim) – tree edit distance similarity.
• TreeBLEU – structural recall of subtrees.
• Trigger Match (TM) – accuracy of workflow triggers.
• Component Match (CM) – overlap of predicted vs. gold components.

Results

• Proprietary models (GPT-4o, Claude-3.7, Gemini 2.0) outperform open-weights without finetuning.

• Finetuned Pixtral-12B achieves SOTA:

  • FlowSim w/ inputs: 0.919
  • TreeBLEU w/ inputs: 0.950
  • Trigger Match: 0.753
  • Component Match: 0.930

Summary

Finetuning yields large gains over base Pixtral-12B and GPT-4o, particularly in matching workflow components and triggers.

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Model Examination

• Finetuned models capture naming conventions and structured execution logic better.
• Failure modes include missing ELSE branches or generic table names.

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Technical Specifications

Model Architecture and Objective

• Base: Pixtral-12B, a multimodal transformer (12B parameters).
• Objective: Image-to-JSON structured workflow generation.

Compute Infrastructure

• Hardware: 16× NVIDIA H100 80GB (2 nodes)
• Software: FSDP, bf16 mixed precision, PyTorch/Transformers

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Citation

BibTeX:

@article{bechard2025starflow,
  title={StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs from Sketch Images},
  author={B{\'e}chard, Patrice and Wang, Chao and Abaskohi, Amirhossein and Rodriguez, Juan and Pal, Christopher and Vazquez, David and Gella, Spandana and Rajeswar, Sai and Taslakian, Perouz},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.21889},
  year={2025}
}

APA: Béchard, P., Wang, C., Abaskohi, A., Rodriguez, J., Pal, C., Vazquez, D., Gella, S., Rajeswar, S., & Taslakian, P. (2025). StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs from Sketch Images. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.21889.

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Glossary

• FlowSim: Metric based on tree edit distance for workflows.
• TreeBLEU: BLEU-like score using tree structures.
• Trigger Match: Correctness of predicted workflow trigger.
• Component Match: Correctness of predicted components (order-agnostic).

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More Information

• ServiceNow Flow Designer
• StarFlow Blog

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The StarFlow Team

• Patrice Béchard, Chao Wang, Amirhossein Abaskohi, Juan Rodriguez, Christopher Pal, David Vazquez, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar, Perouz Taslakian

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Model Card Contact

• Patrice Bechard - [email protected]
• ServiceNow Research – research.servicenow.com