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
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
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
UReason is a benchmark that evaluates how well unified multimodal models (UMMs) align textual reasoning with image generation. It contains 2,000 human‑curated instances across five reasoning‑intensive tasks—Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text—and compares direct generation, reasoning‑guided generation, and decontextualized generation. The study finds that while reasoning‑guided generation improves over direct generation, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms it, indicating that the visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images.
By Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Huijuan Wang, Ivan Yee Lee, Yong Liu, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
arXiv:2607. 18237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human visual similarity judgments are context-dependent.
By Sheng-Yu Wang, Yotam Nitzan, Aaron Hertzmann, Jun-Yan Zhu, Eli Shechtman, Alexei A. Efros, Richard Zhang
MUSE is a new benchmark designed to evaluate large vision‑language models on artistic image understanding within situated educational contexts. It separates image annotation from question generation, offering twelve tasks that cover visual perception, semantic and affective interpretation, cultural understanding, and compositional reasoning across diverse artistic images from Singaporean, Southeast Asian, and Western traditions. The benchmark reveals significant gaps in model performance, especially in affective interpretation and compositional reasoning, and highlights common failure modes for trustworthy educational multimodal systems.
By Luyao Zhu, Xun Wei Yee, Wei Li, Mun Thye Mak, Wee Siong Ng