# LLMScore: Unveiling the Power of Large Language Models in Text-to-Image Synthesis Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11116 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11116/

## Key facts

- Cited by 87 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [PAL: Program-aided Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10435/) (2022)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 87)

- [From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16594/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [LayoutGPT: Compositional Visual Planning and Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15393/) (2023)
- [T2I-CompBench++: An Enhanced and Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06350/) (2023)
- [Agent-as-a-Judge: Evaluate Agents with Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10934/) (2024)
- [VIEScore: Towards Explainable Metrics for Conditional Image Synthesis Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14867/) (2023)
- [GenAI-Bench: Evaluating and Improving Compositional Text-to-Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13743/) (2024)
- [DreamBench++: A Human-Aligned Benchmark for Personalized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16855/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V(ision) as a Generalist Evaluator for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01361/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Survey and Critical Review on Evaluating Large Language Models: Challenges, Limitations, and Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04069/) (2024)
- [Divide & Bind Your Attention for Improved Generative Semantic Nursing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10864/) (2023)
- [WildVision: Evaluating Vision-Language Models in the Wild with Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11069/) (2024)
- [Video-Bench: Human-Aligned Video Generation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04907/) (2025)
- [Progressive3D: Progressively Local Editing for Text-to-3D Content Creation with Complex Semantic Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11784/) (2023)
- [Commonsense-T2I Challenge: Can Text-to-Image Generation Models Understand Commonsense?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07546/) (2024)
- [Revisiting the Role of Language Priors in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01879/) (2023)
- [TC-Bench: Benchmarking Temporal Compositionality in Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08656/) (2024)
- [Reward Guided Latent Consistency Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11027/) (2024)
- [LLMs Meet Multimodal Generation and Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19334/) (2024)
- [Alignment of Diffusion Models: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07253/) (2024)
- [R2I-Bench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Driven Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23493/) (2025)
- [Beyond Aesthetics: Cultural Competence in Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06863/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Hallucination Evaluation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19024/) (2025)
- [Proactive Agents for Multi-Turn Text-to-Image Generation Under Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06771/) (2024)
- [Can Large Vision-Language Models Correct Semantic Grounding Errors By Themselves?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06510/) (2024)
- [EVALALIGN: Supervised Fine-Tuning Multimodal LLMs with Human-Aligned Data for Evaluating Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16562/) (2024)
- [RealCompo: Balancing Realism and Compositionality Improves Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12908/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Quality Metrics for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11821/) (2024)
- [Who Evaluates the Evaluations? Objectively Scoring Text-to-Image Prompt Coherence Metrics with T2IScoreScore (TS2)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04251/) (2024)
- [Energy-based Automated Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12689/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing automatic evaluation on text-to-image synthesis can only provide an image-text matching score, without considering the object-level compositionality, which results in poor correlation with human judgments. In this work, we propose LLMScore, a new framework that offers evaluation scores with multi-granularity compositionality. LLMScore leverages the large language models (LLMs) to evaluate text-to-image models. Initially, it transforms the image into image-level and object-level visual descriptions. Then an evaluation instruction is fed into the LLMs to measure the alignment between the synthesized image and the text, ultimately generating a score accompanied by a rationale. Our substantial analysis reveals the highest correlation of LLMScore with human judgments on a wide range of datasets (Attribute Binding Contrast, Concept Conjunction, MSCOCO, DrawBench, PaintSkills). Notably, our LLMScore achieves Kendall's tau correlation with human evaluations that is 58.8% and 31.2% higher than the commonly-used text-image matching metrics CLIP and BLIP, respectively.