Attribute-Grounded Selective Reasoning for Artwork Emotion Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Cheng, Liu, Yuer, Zhou, Zhiyu, Xie, Hongxia, Cheng, Wen-Huang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Cheng
Liu, Yuer
Zhou, Zhiyu
Xie, Hongxia
Cheng, Wen-Huang
author_facet Zhang, Cheng
Liu, Yuer
Zhou, Zhiyu
Xie, Hongxia
Cheng, Wen-Huang
contents Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can produce fluent artwork emotion explanations, but they often suffer from attribute flooding: they enumerate many visible formal attributes without identifying which cues actually support the affective judgment. We therefore formulate artwork emotion understanding as Attribute-Grounded Selective Reasoning (AGSR), where predefined formal attributes serve as evidence units and only emotionally operative attributes should enter the final interpretation. To make this problem measurable, we extend EmoArt, originally introduced at ACM MM 2025 as a 132,664-artwork resource with content, formal-attribute, valence-arousal, and emotion annotations, by adding a 1,400-artwork human salience extension annotated by 15 art-trained annotators. This extension provides instance-level supervision for distinguishing attributes that are merely present from those that are emotionally salient. We further propose FAB-G (Formal-Attribute Bottleneck-Guided reasoning), a supervised multi-agent framework that first predicts attribute-level salience and then constrains downstream emotional analysis to the retained cues. Experiments show that FAB-G yields consistent gains in emotion, arousal, and valence prediction, achieves stronger agreement with human-marked salient attributes under Dice and Tversky metrics, and produces substantially more compact final explanations than prompting-based baselines. Cross-dataset evaluation further suggests that attribute-grounded salience selection transfers beyond the source distribution of EmoArt, while also revealing attribute-specific boundary cases. The dataset and project page are available at https://zhiliangzhang.github.io/EmoArt-130k/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_15755
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Attribute-Grounded Selective Reasoning for Artwork Emotion Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models
Zhang, Cheng
Liu, Yuer
Zhou, Zhiyu
Xie, Hongxia
Cheng, Wen-Huang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can produce fluent artwork emotion explanations, but they often suffer from attribute flooding: they enumerate many visible formal attributes without identifying which cues actually support the affective judgment. We therefore formulate artwork emotion understanding as Attribute-Grounded Selective Reasoning (AGSR), where predefined formal attributes serve as evidence units and only emotionally operative attributes should enter the final interpretation. To make this problem measurable, we extend EmoArt, originally introduced at ACM MM 2025 as a 132,664-artwork resource with content, formal-attribute, valence-arousal, and emotion annotations, by adding a 1,400-artwork human salience extension annotated by 15 art-trained annotators. This extension provides instance-level supervision for distinguishing attributes that are merely present from those that are emotionally salient. We further propose FAB-G (Formal-Attribute Bottleneck-Guided reasoning), a supervised multi-agent framework that first predicts attribute-level salience and then constrains downstream emotional analysis to the retained cues. Experiments show that FAB-G yields consistent gains in emotion, arousal, and valence prediction, achieves stronger agreement with human-marked salient attributes under Dice and Tversky metrics, and produces substantially more compact final explanations than prompting-based baselines. Cross-dataset evaluation further suggests that attribute-grounded salience selection transfers beyond the source distribution of EmoArt, while also revealing attribute-specific boundary cases. The dataset and project page are available at https://zhiliangzhang.github.io/EmoArt-130k/
title Attribute-Grounded Selective Reasoning for Artwork Emotion Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15755