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Main Authors: Gandhi, Mona, Joseph, KJ, Parthasarathy, Srinivasan, Nag, Sayan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00592
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author Gandhi, Mona
Joseph, KJ
Parthasarathy, Srinivasan
Nag, Sayan
author_facet Gandhi, Mona
Joseph, KJ
Parthasarathy, Srinivasan
Nag, Sayan
contents Effective visual communication stems from the harmony of multiple design principles, such as readability, contrast, alignment, overlap, and coherence, which collectively govern clarity and intent of the communicator. While human designers reason holistically over these principles, machine agents typically condense them into a single heuristic score, offering limited interpretability and diagnostic precision. To address this gap, we introduce PRISM (PRinciple-aware, Interpretable, and Structure-guided Design Modifications), a benchmark that systematically perturbs professional layouts from the Crello dataset along measurable design principles. The benchmark comprises 100K perturbed training samples and 10K perturbed validation designs, each isolating a specific principle violation for controlled analysis of multimodal reasoning about design quality. We show that models like Qwen-2.5-VL and GPT-4o-mini are largely insensitive to targeted principle degradations, whereas GPT-4o exhibits global awareness without fine-grained disentanglement. Building on these insights, we propose a multi-scale evaluation framework that integrates lightweight scorers for quantitative assessment, instruction-tuned vision-language models for localised feedback, and prompt-based methods for global reasoning. Our framework provides interpretable explanations of design failures. Using these localised insights, we show targeted refinements that improve layout quality. Together, PRISM and our framework lay the foundation for interpretable design-literate multimodal reasoning systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00592
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Through the PRISM: Principle-Aware, Interpretable, and Multi-Scale Evaluation of Visual Designs
Gandhi, Mona
Joseph, KJ
Parthasarathy, Srinivasan
Nag, Sayan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Effective visual communication stems from the harmony of multiple design principles, such as readability, contrast, alignment, overlap, and coherence, which collectively govern clarity and intent of the communicator. While human designers reason holistically over these principles, machine agents typically condense them into a single heuristic score, offering limited interpretability and diagnostic precision. To address this gap, we introduce PRISM (PRinciple-aware, Interpretable, and Structure-guided Design Modifications), a benchmark that systematically perturbs professional layouts from the Crello dataset along measurable design principles. The benchmark comprises 100K perturbed training samples and 10K perturbed validation designs, each isolating a specific principle violation for controlled analysis of multimodal reasoning about design quality. We show that models like Qwen-2.5-VL and GPT-4o-mini are largely insensitive to targeted principle degradations, whereas GPT-4o exhibits global awareness without fine-grained disentanglement. Building on these insights, we propose a multi-scale evaluation framework that integrates lightweight scorers for quantitative assessment, instruction-tuned vision-language models for localised feedback, and prompt-based methods for global reasoning. Our framework provides interpretable explanations of design failures. Using these localised insights, we show targeted refinements that improve layout quality. Together, PRISM and our framework lay the foundation for interpretable design-literate multimodal reasoning systems.
title Through the PRISM: Principle-Aware, Interpretable, and Multi-Scale Evaluation of Visual Designs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00592