arXiv Computation and Language

Can MLLMs Critique Like Humans? Evaluating Open-Ended Aesthetic Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

The study evaluates whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can produce open‑ended aesthetic critiques comparable to humans. Eight open‑weight MLLMs (7 B–397 B) and GPT‑5.5 were tested on 1,227 r/photocritique posts under various prompts, revealing that reference‑based similarity metrics often misrepresent model performance, while shorter critiques and image‑omission had limited impact. Human judges and annotators found the models’ critiques largely different from human ones, noting that models tend to be overly comprehensive and repetitive rather than selective and specific.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

AesCanvas: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Aesthetic Critique and Contextual Suitability

AesCanvas is a new dataset and benchmark that evaluates image aesthetic models on two fronts: CritiqueCanvas, which contains 519,136 instruction–response pairs for long‑form, multi‑dimensional critique across photography, painting, and virtual imagery, and ContextCanvas, which offers 301 expert‑reviewed use scenarios to assess contextual aesthetic suitability. The benchmark tests closed‑source, open‑weight general, and aesthetic‑specific multimodal large language models, revealing that models excel at critique generation but lag in context‑sensitive judgment. The study shows that aesthetic specialization does not reliably transfer to contextual suitability and highlights the need for culturally situated, evidence‑grounded suitability as a distinct objective for aesthetic modeling.

By Xuanwei Hu, Haoyu Dong, Kejun Wu, Tianyi Liu, Jianjun Gao
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Mitigating Perceptual Judgment Bias in Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge via Perceptual Perturbation and Reward Modeling

arXiv:2606. 02578v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning ability, yet their reliability as automated evaluators remains limited by a critical weakness: when visual evidence conflicts with textual cues, MLLM judges tend to reward plausible narratives over perceptually correct answers.

By Seojeong Park, Jiho Choi, Junyong Kang, Seonho Lee, Jaeyo Shin, Hyunjung Shim
arXiv AI
Jul 21

From Weights to Words: Expressing and Editing Preference Model Inferences in Natural Language

arXiv:2607. 16232v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing use of statistical learning algorithms to infer human preferences from high-dimensional choice data runs up against a fundamental challenge: choice alternatives typically differ in many ways simultaneously, so it is generally unclear which factors actually drove an observed decision and should be credited as preferences.

By Zachary Wojtowicz, Ayush Nayak, Jacob Andreas
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

IDEAlign: Comparing Ideas of Large Language Models to Domain Expert

IDEAlign introduces a new protocol for evaluating the similarity of large language model (LLM) annotations to expert judgments. It uses pick‑the‑odd‑one‑out tasks to capture expert similarity and benchmarks various similarity methods—including text embeddings, topic models, and LLM-as-a-judge—against these human ratings. Applied to educational datasets, the study finds that most metrics miss nuanced expert dimensions, with LLM-as-a-judge performing best yet still insufficient for full expert alignment.

By Hyunji Nam, Lucia Langlois, James Malamut, Mei Tan, Dorottya Demszky
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

Style Wins, Substance Loses: A Diagnosis of LLM-as-Judge in Idea Generation

However, whether these judges truly evaluate the scientific substance of ideas or are influenced by superficial stylistic presentation remains an open question. To address this question, we propose SciStyleBench, a unified three-component benchmark for diagnosing and mitigating stylistic bias in LLM-based idea evaluation: (i) First, SciStyleStage, a three-stage evaluation environment that applies controlled stylistic perturbations to fixed scientific content across three settings no context, fixed-domain context, and open-domain retrieval context, covering 600 scientific ideas and 15 style variants, with 9,000 evaluation instances per setting; (ii) Second, SciStyleMetrics, a set of quantitative measures, including Style Bias Index (SBI), Substance Recognition Rate (SRR), and Adversarial Win Rate (AWR), to characterize how stylistic variation affects scoring stability, substance discrimination, and ranking robustness; (iii) Third, SciStyleExtractor, a plug-and-play evaluation module that separates presentation style from scientific content by predicting style type and deviation before style-conditioned evaluation, enabling us to assess whether style awareness reduces stylistic bias.

arXiv AI
Sep 15

NoteVQA: Benchmarking VLMs on Real-Life Questions from Human Communities

NoteVQA is a new benchmark that collects 252 real‑life visual questions from the Chinese image‑sharing platform Xiaohongshu, covering 12 topics and 7 user intents. Each question is paired with a concise expert reference and a human‑audited interleaved answer that blends text and visual evidence. The study evaluates VLMs on short‑answer correctness and interleaved answer quality using a new AgenticInterleave framework and a 12‑dimensional IVR‑12 rubric, finding that even state‑of‑the‑art models achieve only about 53% accuracy and lag behind human references in content quality.

By Haonan Jiang, Guojian Zhan, Jiancong Xie, Shijun Wan, Dongiia Zhao, Cheng Chen, Yahui Liu, Yao Hu, Chuan Mu