ArtiMuse: Fine-Grained Image Aesthetics Assessment with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding

[🌐 Project Page] [🚀 Online Demo] [💻 Code] [📄 Paper] [[🧩 Checkpoints: 🤗 Hugging Face | 🤖 ModelScope]]

🌟 Building upon on ArtiMuse, we introduce UniPercept, a comprehensive follow-up work that provides a meticulous study on perceptual-level image understanding. It spans Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA), Image Quality Assessment (IQA), and Image Structure & Texture Assessment (ISTA) across both Visual Rating (VR) and Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks.

<img alt="Code" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-UniPercept-181717?logo=github&logoColor=white" height="25" />

Shuo Cao, Nan Ma, Jiayang Li, Xiaohui Li, Lihao Shao, Kaiwen Zhu, Yu Zhou, Yuandong Pu, Jiarui Wu, Jiaquan Wang, Bo Qu, Wenhai Wang, Yu Qiao, Dajuin Yao†, Yihao Liu†

University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai AI Laboratory, China Academy of Art, Peking University

† Corresponding Authors

📰 News & Updates

• 🚀 Dec 29, 2025 🔥 Building upon on ArtiMuse, we introduce UniPercept, a comprehensive follow-up work that provides a meticulous study on perceptual-level image understanding. It spans Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA), Image Quality Assessment (IQA), and Image Structure & Texture Assessment (ISTA) across both Visual Rating (VR) and Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks.

  • Technical Report
  • Project Page
  • UniPercept-Bench: A comprehensive perceptual-level understanding benchmark for MLLMs, spanning IAA, IQA, and ISTA across VR and VQA tasks.
  • UniPercept: A powerful baseline MLLM specialized for perceptual image understanding, optimized via Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training and Task-Aligned RL.

• 🚀 Dec 29, 2025 The test set of the ArtiMuse-10K Dataset is now available! 🚀

• 🚀 Sep 3, 2025
  The Checkpoints and Evaluation Code of ArtiMuse are now available! 🚀

• 🚀 July 28, 2025
  ArtiMuse was officially released at WAIC 2025, in the forum "Evolving with AI: The Iteration and Resilience of Artistic Creativity"

• 🚀 July 24, 2025
  The Online Demo is now open for public access!

• 🚀 July 21, 2025
  The Paper, Repository and Project Page are now live!

🔍 Abstract

The rapid advancement of educational applications, artistic creation, and AI-generated content (AIGC) technologies has substantially increased practical requirements for comprehensive Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA), particularly demanding methods capable of delivering both quantitative scoring and professional understanding.

In this paper, we present:
(1) ArtiMuse, an innovative MLLM-based IAA model with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding capabilities;
(2) ArtiMuse-10K, the first expert-curated image aesthetic dataset comprising 10,000 images spanning 5 main categories and 15 subcategories, each annotated by professional experts with 8-dimensional attributes analysis and a holistic score.

💾 Dataset

The test set of the ArtiMuse-10K is available at ArtiMuse-10K.

The ArtiMuse-10K dataset is available for academic research. By requesting access, you agree to the following Terms of Use:

• Non-commercial: Research use only. Commercial use is prohibited.
• No Redistribution: Do not share or distribute the dataset to any third party.
• Attribution: Properly cite or credit ArtiMuse in any resulting work.

To request the download link, please fill out the following application form: ArtiMuse-10K Access Request Form

📦 Checkpoints

All paper-version checkpoints share the same text pretraining process, but differ in their score finetuning datasets:

⚙️ Setup

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/thunderbolt215/ArtiMuse.git

Create a conda virtual environment and activate it: (please ensure that Python>=3.9).

conda create -n artimuse python=3.10
conda activate artimuse

Install dependencies using requirements.txt:

pip install -r requirements.txt

We recommend to use FlashAttention for acceleration:

pip install flash-attn --no-build-isolation

📊 Evaluation

1. Prepare Checkpoints

Download the pretrained checkpoints and place them under the checkpoints/ directory. The folder structure should look like:

ArtiMuse
└── checkpoints/
    ├── ArtiMuse
    ├── ArtiMuse_AVA
    ├── ArtiMuse_FLICKR-AES
    ├── ...

---

2. Evaluation on a Single Image

Run the following command to evaluate a single image:

python src/eval/eval_image.py \
    --model_name ArtiMuse \
    --image_path example/test.jpg \
    --device cuda:0

• Arguments

  • --model_name: Name of the checkpoint to use (e.g., ArtiMuse, ArtiMuse_AVA).
  • --image_path: Path to the input image.
  • --device: Inference device, e.g., cuda:0.

• Results are saved to:

  results/image_results/{input_image_name}_{model_name}_eval.json
  

---

3. Evaluation on Benchmark Datasets

Download the test datasets and organize them under test_datasets/{dataset_name}/images/. The expected structure is:

ArtiMuse
└── test_datasets/
    ├── AVA
    │   ├── images/
    │   └── test.json
    ├── TAD66K
    ├── FLICKR-AES
    └── ...

• images/: contains the test images.
• test.json: provides the ground-truth scores (gt_score) for evaluation.

Run dataset-level evaluation with:

python src/eval/eval_dataset.py \
    --model_name ArtiMuse_AVA \
    --dataset AVA \
    --device cuda:0

• Arguments

  • --model_name: Name of the checkpoint to use (e.g., ArtiMuse_AVA).
  • --dataset: Dataset name (e.g., AVA, TAD66K, FLICKR-AES).
  • --device: Inference device.

• Results are saved to:

  results/dataset_results/{dataset}_{model_name}.json
  

🙏 Acknowledgements

Our work is built upon the InternVL-3 model as the base foundation. We also refer to the implementation of Q-Align during development. We sincerely thank the authors of both projects for their excellent contributions to the community.

✒️ Citation

If you find this work useful, please consider citing:

@misc{cao2025uniperceptunifiedperceptuallevelimage,
      title={UniPercept: Towards Unified Perceptual-Level Image Understanding across Aesthetics, Quality, Structure, and Texture}, 
      author={Shuo Cao and Jiayang Li and Xiaohui Li and Yuandong Pu and Kaiwen Zhu and Yuanting Gao and Siqi Luo and Yi Xin and Qi Qin and Yu Zhou and Xiangyu Chen and Wenlong Zhang and Bin Fu and Yu Qiao and Yihao Liu},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2512.21675},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21675}, 
}

@misc{cao2025artimusefinegrainedimageaesthetics,
      title={ArtiMuse: Fine-Grained Image Aesthetics Assessment with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding}, 
      author={Shuo Cao and Nan Ma and Jiayang Li and Xiaohui Li and Lihao Shao and Kaiwen Zhu and Yu Zhou and Yuandong Pu and Jiarui Wu and Jiaquan Wang and Bo Qu and Wenhai Wang and Yu Qiao and Dajuin Yao and Yihao Liu},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2507.14533},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14533}, 
}