Beyond Pixels: Visual Metaphor Transfer via Schema-Driven Agentic Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Xu, Yu, Zhang, Yuxin, Cao, Juan, Gao, Lin, Wang, Chunyu, Deussen, Oliver, Lee, Tong-Yee, Tang, Fan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Xu, Yu
Zhang, Yuxin
Cao, Juan
Gao, Lin
Wang, Chunyu
Deussen, Oliver
Lee, Tong-Yee
Tang, Fan
author_facet Xu, Yu
Zhang, Yuxin
Cao, Juan
Gao, Lin
Wang, Chunyu
Deussen, Oliver
Lee, Tong-Yee
Tang, Fan
contents A visual metaphor constitutes a high-order form of human creativity, employing cross-domain semantic fusion to transform abstract concepts into impactful visual rhetoric. Despite the remarkable progress of generative AI, existing models remain largely confined to pixel-level instruction alignment and surface-level appearance preservation, failing to capture the underlying abstract logic necessary for genuine metaphorical generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of Visual Metaphor Transfer (VMT), which challenges models to autonomously decouple the "creative essence" from a reference image and re-materialize that abstract logic onto a user-specified target subject. We propose a cognitive-inspired, multi-agent framework that operationalizes Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) through a novel Schema Grammar ("G"). This structured representation decouples relational invariants from specific visual entities, providing a rigorous foundation for cross-domain logic re-instantiation. Our pipeline executes VMT through a collaborative system of specialized agents: a perception agent that distills the reference into a schema, a transfer agent that maintains generic space invariance to discover apt carriers, a generation agent for high-fidelity synthesis and a hierarchical diagnostic agent that mimics a professional critic, performing closed-loop backtracking to identify and rectify errors across abstract logic, component selection, and prompt encoding. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms SOTA baselines in metaphor consistency, analogy appropriateness, and visual creativity, paving the way for automated high-impact creative applications in advertising and media. Source code will be made publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_01335
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Pixels: Visual Metaphor Transfer via Schema-Driven Agentic Reasoning
Xu, Yu
Zhang, Yuxin
Cao, Juan
Gao, Lin
Wang, Chunyu
Deussen, Oliver
Lee, Tong-Yee
Tang, Fan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
A visual metaphor constitutes a high-order form of human creativity, employing cross-domain semantic fusion to transform abstract concepts into impactful visual rhetoric. Despite the remarkable progress of generative AI, existing models remain largely confined to pixel-level instruction alignment and surface-level appearance preservation, failing to capture the underlying abstract logic necessary for genuine metaphorical generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of Visual Metaphor Transfer (VMT), which challenges models to autonomously decouple the "creative essence" from a reference image and re-materialize that abstract logic onto a user-specified target subject. We propose a cognitive-inspired, multi-agent framework that operationalizes Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) through a novel Schema Grammar ("G"). This structured representation decouples relational invariants from specific visual entities, providing a rigorous foundation for cross-domain logic re-instantiation. Our pipeline executes VMT through a collaborative system of specialized agents: a perception agent that distills the reference into a schema, a transfer agent that maintains generic space invariance to discover apt carriers, a generation agent for high-fidelity synthesis and a hierarchical diagnostic agent that mimics a professional critic, performing closed-loop backtracking to identify and rectify errors across abstract logic, component selection, and prompt encoding. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms SOTA baselines in metaphor consistency, analogy appropriateness, and visual creativity, paving the way for automated high-impact creative applications in advertising and media. Source code will be made publicly available.
title Beyond Pixels: Visual Metaphor Transfer via Schema-Driven Agentic Reasoning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01335