ArtRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Structured Context for Visual Art Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Shuai, Najdenkoska, Ivona, Zhu, Hongyi, Rudinac, Stevan, Kackovic, Monika, Wijnberg, Nachoem, Worring, Marcel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Shuai
Najdenkoska, Ivona
Zhu, Hongyi
Rudinac, Stevan
Kackovic, Monika
Wijnberg, Nachoem
Worring, Marcel
author_facet Wang, Shuai
Najdenkoska, Ivona
Zhu, Hongyi
Rudinac, Stevan
Kackovic, Monika
Wijnberg, Nachoem
Worring, Marcel
contents Understanding visual art requires reasoning across multiple perspectives -- cultural, historical, and stylistic -- beyond mere object recognition. While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform well on general image captioning, they often fail to capture the nuanced interpretations that fine art demands. We propose ArtRAG, a novel, training-free framework that combines structured knowledge with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for multi-perspective artwork explanation. ArtRAG automatically constructs an Art Context Knowledge Graph (ACKG) from domain-specific textual sources, organizing entities such as artists, movements, themes, and historical events into a rich, interpretable graph. At inference time, a multi-granular structured retriever selects semantically and topologically relevant subgraphs to guide generation. This enables MLLMs to produce contextually grounded, culturally informed art descriptions. Experiments on the SemArt and Artpedia datasets show that ArtRAG outperforms several heavily trained baselines. Human evaluations further confirm that ArtRAG generates coherent, insightful, and culturally enriched interpretations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_06020
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ArtRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Structured Context for Visual Art Understanding
Wang, Shuai
Najdenkoska, Ivona
Zhu, Hongyi
Rudinac, Stevan
Kackovic, Monika
Wijnberg, Nachoem
Worring, Marcel
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Understanding visual art requires reasoning across multiple perspectives -- cultural, historical, and stylistic -- beyond mere object recognition. While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform well on general image captioning, they often fail to capture the nuanced interpretations that fine art demands. We propose ArtRAG, a novel, training-free framework that combines structured knowledge with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for multi-perspective artwork explanation. ArtRAG automatically constructs an Art Context Knowledge Graph (ACKG) from domain-specific textual sources, organizing entities such as artists, movements, themes, and historical events into a rich, interpretable graph. At inference time, a multi-granular structured retriever selects semantically and topologically relevant subgraphs to guide generation. This enables MLLMs to produce contextually grounded, culturally informed art descriptions. Experiments on the SemArt and Artpedia datasets show that ArtRAG outperforms several heavily trained baselines. Human evaluations further confirm that ArtRAG generates coherent, insightful, and culturally enriched interpretations.
title ArtRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Structured Context for Visual Art Understanding
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06020