# UNIAA: A Unified Multi-modal Image Aesthetic Assessment Baseline and Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09619 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09619/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [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)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [A-OKVQA: A Benchmark for Visual Question Answering using World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01718/) (2022)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [Chat-UniVi: Unified Visual Representation Empowers Large Language Models with Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08046/) (2023)
- [LanguageBind: Extending Video-Language Pretraining to N-modality by Language-based Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01852/) (2023)
- [Q-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Foundation Models on Low-level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14181/) (2023)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [Photo Aesthetics Ranking Network with Attributes and Content Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01621/) (2016)
- [Recognizing Image Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3715/) (2013)
- [Personalized Image Aesthetics Assessment with Rich Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16754/) (2022)
- [Effective Aesthetics Prediction with Multi-level Spatially Pooled Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01382/) (2019)
- [Image Aesthetic Assessment: An Experimental Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00838/) (2016)
- [A-Lamp: Adaptive Layout-Aware Multi-Patch Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Photo Aesthetic Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00248/) (2017)
- [Aesthetic Attributes Assessment of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04983/) (2019)
- [Distilling Knowledge from Object Classification to Aesthetics Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00809/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [A Survey on Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15769/) (2024)
- [ArtiMuse: Fine-Grained Image Aesthetics Assessment with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14533/) (2025)
- [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)
- [The Synergy between Data and Multi-Modal Large Language Models: A Survey from Co-Development Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08583/) (2024)
- [EEmo-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-modal Large Language Models on Image Evoked Emotion Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16405/) (2025)
- [The Photographer Eye: Teaching Multimodal Large Language Models to Understand Image Aesthetics like Photographers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18582/) (2025)
- [Presenting a Paper is an Art: Self-Improvement Aesthetic Agents for Academic Presentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05571/) (2025)
- [Next Token Is Enough: Realistic Image Quality and Aesthetic Scoring with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06141/) (2025)
- [AesBiasBench: Evaluating Bias and Alignment in Multimodal Language Models for Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11620/) (2025)
- [Unlocking the Essence of Beauty: Advanced Aesthetic Reasoning with Relative-Absolute Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21871/) (2025)
- [Can Vision Language Models Assess Graphic Design Aesthetics? A Benchmark, Evaluation, and Dataset Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01083/) (2026)
- [Scaling-up Perceptual Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22543/) (2025)
- [Research-Oriented Human-Centric Evaluation for Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01793/) (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)
- [MagicMirror: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Artifacts Assessment in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10260/) (2025)
- [EEmo-Logic: A Unified Dataset and Multi-Stage Framework for Comprehensive Image-Evoked Emotion Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01173/) (2026)
- [Visual Aesthetic Benchmark: Can Frontier Models Judge Beauty?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12684/) (2026)
- [Advancing Comprehensive Aesthetic Insight with Multi-Scale Text-Guided Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11952/) (2024)
- [AesRM: Improving Video Aesthetics with Expert-Level Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.28078/) (2026)
- [PlanGPT-VL: Enhancing Urban Planning with Domain-Specific Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14481/) (2025)
- [SNS-Bench-VL: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models in Social Networking Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23065/) (2025)
- [Can MLLMs Critique Like Humans? Evaluating Open-Ended Aesthetic Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29689/) (2026)
- [What Makes a Good Generated Image? Investigating Human and Multimodal LLM Image Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12750/) (2025)
- [OmniQuality-R: Advancing Reward Models Through All-Encompassing Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10609/) (2025)
- [AesTest: Measuring Aesthetic Intelligence from Perception to Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06360/) (2025)
- [What Do Vision-Language Models Encode for Personalized Image Aesthetics Assessment?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11374/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As an alternative to expensive expert evaluation, Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) stands out as a crucial task in computer vision. However, traditional IAA methods are typically constrained to a single data source or task, restricting the universality and broader application. In this work, to better align with human aesthetics, we propose a Unified Multi-modal Image Aesthetic Assessment (UNIAA) framework, including a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) named UNIAA-LLaVA and a comprehensive benchmark named UNIAA-Bench. We choose MLLMs with both visual perception and language ability for IAA and establish a low-cost paradigm for transforming the existing datasets into unified and high-quality visual instruction tuning data, from which the UNIAA-LLaVA is trained. To further evaluate the IAA capability of MLLMs, we construct the UNIAA-Bench, which consists of three aesthetic levels: Perception, Description, and Assessment. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and rationality of UNIAA. UNIAA-LLaVA achieves competitive performance on all levels of UNIAA-Bench, compared with existing MLLMs. Specifically, our model performs better than GPT-4V in aesthetic perception and even approaches the junior-level human. We find MLLMs have great potential in IAA, yet there remains plenty of room for further improvement. The UNIAA-LLaVA and UNIAA-Bench will be released.