The paper introduces VMetaphor-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating visual metaphor generation in text-to-image models, comprising 1,500 curated metaphors across three levels and ten categories, each paired with two prompts of varying specificity. It proposes a hybrid evaluation framework using a multiple-choice question protocol and dimension-based scoring to assess metaphorical fidelity. Experiments on 11 T2I models show that even top proprietary models struggle with compositional structuring and cross-domain mapping, underscoring the need for further research in this area.
By Chuer Chen, Zichen Wang, Yi He, Zhengxi Yu, Nan Cao
Similes provide a compact and expressive way to describe visual characteristics in text prompts. Recent text-to-image models (t2i models) can produce visually compelling outputs from simile prompts, yet even frontier models frequently misinterpret the metaphorical vehicle and confuse it with the object.
The paper introduces Visual Metaphor Transfer (VMT), a task that requires models to extract the abstract ‘creative essence’ from a reference image and apply it to a new target subject. It proposes a multi‑agent framework based on Conceptual Blending Theory, using a Schema Grammar to separate relational invariants from visual entities. The system includes perception, transfer, generation, and diagnostic agents, and experimental results show it outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines in metaphor consistency, analogy appropriateness, and visual creativity.
By Yu Xu, Yuxin Zhang, Lin Gao, Oliver Deussen, Tong-Yee Lee, Fan Tang
The paper introduces ACVA-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate text‑to‑image models on their ability to visualize abstract concepts—those without fixed visual referents—across three dimensions: semantic sufficiency, representational diversity, and conceptual distinctiveness. It proposes a fine‑grained visual‑semantic evaluation method that decomposes concept semantics into verifiable questions, bypassing the need for reference images. Benchmark results reveal that current models tend to rely on a limited set of prototypical visual patterns, indicating room for improvement in diversity and distinctiveness.
By Mengyan Wang, Jiyuan An, Yining Liu, YaoWen Zhang, Liner Yang ang Erhong Yang
PRISM is a modality‑agnostic, category‑theoretic framework that measures and refines multimodal analogies by representing them as explicit relational mappings. It introduces a pullback score to quantify relational alignment and an iterative refinement loop that uses this score as feedback to improve generated images. On the AnaloBench benchmark, PRISM’s pullback score alone achieves 82.5% accuracy, and human evaluations show a 57.65% preference for refined outputs, though refinement may sometimes favor visually crowded compositions.
By Mirella Zeisler, Ojas Shirekar, Mircea Lic\v{a}, Chirag Raman
arXiv:2608. 15828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current evaluation of metaphor explanations relies mainly on holistic quality ratings, revealing little about how explanation quality is structured or where human judgments agree and diverge.
By Ana Naveriani, Jakob Suchan, Stefano Zoia, Mehul Bhatt, Antonio Lieto, Gian Luca Pozzato
arXiv:2606. 28406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image and multimodal generative models are increasingly used to produce scientific figures such as mechanism diagrams, experimental-design schematics, conceptual frameworks, and graphical abstracts.
By Davie Chen
M$^3$R-Bench is a new benchmark comprising 1,000 human‑annotated image‑text pairs that jointly label metaphor occurrence, Target‑Source mapping, and sentiment, and provide step‑by‑step explanations for evidence identification, mapping, and sentiment inference. Existing models often rely on textual shortcuts and produce mappings that conflict with visual evidence, as shown by evaluations on this dataset. To address this, the authors propose M$^3$R‑Reasoner, a model that uses curriculum‑based reasoning supervision and task‑aware reinforcement learning, achieving a 37.90% Joint Label Accuracy and outperforming both proprietary baselines and GPT‑5.5 on evidence and sentiment justification.
By Hong Jiang, Junnan Zhu, Jingwang Huang, Xiao Sun, Yuming Yang, Jiang Zhong, Ruirui Chen, Jingman Shi, Hao Wu, Nayu Liu, Xinyi Jiang, Kaiwen Wei
arXiv:2510. 04120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on metaphor detection and interpretation tasks, yet it remains unclear what such behavioral success reveals about metaphor processing.
By Fengying Ye, Shanshan Wang, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong
The paper introduces Redemption Score (RS), a multi‑modal evaluation framework for image captioning that combines three complementary signals: Mutual Information Divergence for global image‑text alignment, DINO‑based perceptual similarity of cycle‑generated images for visual grounding, and LLM text embeddings for contextual similarity to human references. RS fuses these signals to provide a more holistic assessment, achieving a Kendall‑τ of 58.42 on Flickr8k and outperforming most prior methods. The framework demonstrates consistent performance across Conceptual Captions and MS COCO, offering a robust evaluation that captures both visual accuracy and text quality.
By Ashim Dahal, Ankit Ghimire, Saydul Akbar Murad, Nick Rahimi
arXiv:2602. 02465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation.
By Jana Zeller, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Fanfei Li, Thomas Klein, Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Matthias Bethge, Felix Wichmann, Ryan Cotterell, Wieland Brendel
CompArt introduces a new approach to aesthetic alignment in text-to-image generation by using the Principles of Art (PoA) such as Balance, Rhythm, and Emphasis to define explicit compositional constraints. The authors create a large dataset of 80,032 WikiArt images, each annotated with PoA analyses generated by a multimodal LLM, and present ArtDapter, a lightweight adapter that steers a pretrained diffusion model along ten PoA dimensions while preserving semantic fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that CompArt outperforms strong baselines in adhering to PoA controls under a dual evaluation protocol.
By Zhe Jin, Tat-Seng Chua