# AesBench: An Expert Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models on Image Aesthetics Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08276 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08276/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image editing and quality assessment, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 35 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Image editing and quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/image-editing-and-quality-assessment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03726/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl2: Revolutionizing Multi-modal Large Language Model with Modality Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04257/) (2023)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14896/) (2022)
- [KonIQ-10k: An ecologically valid database for deep learning of blind image quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06180/) (2019)
- [Q-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Foundation Models on Low-level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14181/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Learning for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04020/) (2018)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Photo Aesthetics Ranking Network with Attributes and Content Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01621/) (2016)
- [ArtEmis: Affective Language for Visual Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07396/) (2021)
- [TinyGPT-V: Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model via Small Backbones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16862/) (2023)
- [Personalized Image Aesthetics Assessment with Rich Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16754/) (2022)
- [A Perceptual Quality Assessment Exploration for AIGC Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12618/) (2023)
- [Towards Artistic Image Aesthetics Assessment: a Large-scale Dataset and a New Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15166/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [VLMEvalKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluating Large Multi-Modality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11691/) (2024)
- [SPHINX-X: Scaling Data and Parameters for a Family of Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05935/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Benchmarks of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08632/) (2024)
- [AesExpert: Towards Multi-modality Foundation Model for Image Aesthetics Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09624/) (2024)
- [ChartInsights: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Level Chart Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07001/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15769/) (2024)
- [SHIELD : An Evaluation Benchmark for Face Spoofing and Forgery Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04178/) (2024)
- [A-Bench: Are LMMs Masters at Evaluating AI-generated Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03070/) (2024)
- [Q-Bench-Video: Benchmarking the Video Quality Understanding of LMMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20063/) (2024)
- [FakeBench: Probing Explainable Fake Image Detection via Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13306/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Benchmarks: In the Era of Large AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18142/) (2024)
- [Quality Assessment in the Era of Large Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00031/) (2024)
- [UniPercept: Towards Unified Perceptual-Level Image Understanding across Aesthetics, Quality, Structure, and Texture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21675/) (2025)
- [HumanAesExpert: Advancing a Multi-Modality Foundation Model for Human Image Aesthetic Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23907/) (2025)
- [EEmo-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-modal Large Language Models on Image Evoked Emotion Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16405/) (2025)
- [UniQA: Unified Vision-Language Pre-training for Image Quality and Aesthetic Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01069/) (2024)
- [HEIE: MLLM-Based Hierarchical Explainable AIGC Image Implausibility Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17261/) (2024)
- [The Photographer Eye: Teaching Multimodal Large Language Models to Understand Image Aesthetics like Photographers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18582/) (2025)
- [From Captions to Rewards (CAREVL): Leveraging Large Language Model Experts for Enhanced Reward Modeling in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06260/) (2025)
- [FakeScope: Large Multimodal Expert Model for Transparent AI-Generated Image Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24267/) (2025)
- [AesBiasBench: Evaluating Bias and Alignment in Multimodal Language Models for Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11620/) (2025)
- [MoEdit: On Learning Quantity Perception for Multi-object Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10112/) (2025)
- [Q-Adapt: Adapting LMM for Visual Quality Assessment with Progressive Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01655/) (2025)
- [FaceShield: Explainable Face Anti-Spoofing with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09415/) (2025)
- [Can Vision Language Models Assess Graphic Design Aesthetics? A Benchmark, Evaluation, and Dataset Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01083/) (2026)
- [Text2QR: Harmonizing Aesthetic Customization and Scanning Robustness for Text-Guided QR Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06452/) (2024)
- [Language-Guided Visual Perception Disentanglement for Image Quality Assessment and Conditional Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02206/) (2025)
- [Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21978/) (2025)
- [Venus: Benchmarking and Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models for Aesthetic Guidance and Cropping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23980/) (2026)
- [Fine-grained Image Aesthetic Assessment: Learning Discriminative Scores from Relative Ranks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03907/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With collective endeavors, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are undergoing a flourishing development. However, their performances on image aesthetics perception remain indeterminate, which is highly desired in real-world applications. An obvious obstacle lies in the absence of a specific benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of MLLMs on aesthetic perception. This blind groping may impede the further development of more advanced MLLMs with aesthetic perception capacity. To address this dilemma, we propose AesBench, an expert benchmark aiming to comprehensively evaluate the aesthetic perception capacities of MLLMs through elaborate design across dual facets. (1) We construct an Expert-labeled Aesthetics Perception Database (EAPD), which features diversified image contents and high-quality annotations provided by professional aesthetic experts. (2) We propose a set of integrative criteria to measure the aesthetic perception abilities of MLLMs from four perspectives, including Perception (AesP), Empathy (AesE), Assessment (AesA) and Interpretation (AesI). Extensive experimental results underscore that the current MLLMs only possess rudimentary aesthetic perception ability, and there is still a significant gap between MLLMs and humans. We hope this work can inspire the community to engage in deeper explorations on the aesthetic potentials of MLLMs. Source data will be available at https://github.com/yipoh/AesBench.