Beauty assessments from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly popular, prompting a study comparing 2,513 human ratings to four commercial AI models—Claude, Gemini, GPT, and Grok. The study found that MLLMs consistently rate faces more favorably and with a narrower range than humans, yet they maintain strong correlations with human judgments and accurately track the rank‑ordering of faces. While all models agree strongly with each other, Grok showed the lowest agreement with human ratings, and only face age emerged as a common predictor of attractiveness across humans and MLLMs.
By Santiago Grandas, Juan Sebastian Cely-Acosta, Mohit Mendiratta, Shafee Hassan, Macken Murphy
The paper audits 27 text‑to‑image generators released between 2022 and 2026, examining 51,300 AI‑generated faces and 160,196 real photographs. Using automated metrics and 550 human raters, it finds that AI‑generated faces consistently score higher on attractiveness than real faces, with female‑prompted images often surpassing professional models and darker‑skinned groups receiving lower scores. A preregistered hiring simulation shows that exposure to AI‑generated attractive faces reduces hireability and trustworthiness ratings for real candidates, whereas retouched photographs have no such effect.
By AJ Alvero, Deepak Varuvel Dennison, Alexandra Crespin, Heeyon Kim, Alejandra Regla-Vargas, Avani Akerkar, Jasmine McNealy, Ren\'e Kizilcec
arXiv:2512. 08724v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text-to-image (TTI) diffusion models have achieved remarkable visual quality, yet they have been repeatedly shown to exhibit social biases across sensitive attributes such as gender, race and age.
By Manos Plitsis, Giorgos Bouritsas, Vassilis Katsouros, Yannis Panagakis
arXiv:2605. 20731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-to-image models now generate graphic design at production scale, yet their supervision still comes primarily from photo-style preference datasets with a single overall verdict per comparison.
By Haonan Zhu, Elad Hirsch, Alexandria Minetti, Allison Nulty, Purvanshi Mehta
The paper presents a post‑training approach for text‑to‑image models that combines a preference reward, trained on large human preference data, with rubric‑based rewards that assess prompt faithfulness and other desirable traits. The authors show that a simple reward composition strategy outperforms a naive weighted average, leading to significant Elo gains on the Arena leaderboard for models like Flux2dev and Ideogram‑4. They also release Arena‑T2I‑Training, a 1K subset of data to aid reproducible research in post‑training.
By Yuanhao Ban, I-Hung Hsu, Anastasios Angelopoulos, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ion Stoica, Cho-Jui Hsieh
arXiv:2610.34221v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Aesthetic image cropping (AIC) aims to improve image composition and aesthetic quality by removing extraneous or distracting content. Over the past dec...
By Xiangfei Sheng, Xiaofeng Pan, Leida Li, Qian Zhang, Biao Wang, Johan Wagemans, Weisi Lin
arXiv:2608.24219v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Facial attractiveness has been linked to statistical regularities such as symmetry and averageness, suggesting that beauty may depend on the ease with...
By Francisco M. L\'opez, Jochen Triesch
arXiv:2602. 15278v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The web is littered with images, once created for human consumption and now increasingly interpreted by agents using vision-language models (VLMs).
By Manuel Cherep, Pranav M R, Pattie Maes, Nikhil Singh
arXiv:2606. 08841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly deployed in open-ended creative contexts, yet their outputs remain impersonal, optimized for aggregate aesthetics rather than individual taste.
By Harini SI, Somesh Singh, Yaman Kumar Singla, David Doermann, Rajiv Ratn Shah
The paper introduces Diffusion LAIR, a listwise preference optimization technique that leverages continuous reward scores instead of binary pairwise comparisons to align text‑to‑image diffusion models. LAIR transforms reward scores into centered advantage weights and optimizes an advantage‑weighted regression objective on an implicit reward defined by denoising‑loss improvement over a reference model, with a quadratic penalty to regulate reward magnitude. Experiments demonstrate that Diffusion LAIR surpasses strong baseline methods on SD1.5 and SDXL across generation, compositional, and editing tasks.
By Austin Wang, Jiaqi Han, Stefano Ermon, Yisong Yue
The study audits eight text-to-image models (four Western, four Chinese) by generating 56,000 synthetic faces under neutral and six emotion prompts. It finds pervasive demographic biases: young and White-coded faces are overrepresented, while combinations like young female Black faces are nearly absent. Emotion prompts further skew outputs, with negative emotions favoring White, middle-aged, male-coded faces and lower perceived attractiveness. The research highlights the need for intersectional, emotion‑conditioned, multilingual audits before deploying such models.
By Mengting Wei, Aditya Gulati, Guoying Zhao, Nuria Oliver
arXiv:2607. 15740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Text-to-Image (T2I) systems rapidly advance, evaluating the cultural authenticity of synthesized content has become increasingly important for fair and trustworthy generative AI.
By Bo-An Chang, Yu-Chih Chen