baidu/ERNIE-Image-Aes

ERNIE-Image-Aes: Robust Image Aesthetics Scoring with Balanced Category Generalization

[📄 Paper]

🌟 Highlights

ERNIE-Image-Aes is a 8B vision-language model for image aesthetic scoring, initialized from ArtiMuse and fine-tuned on a diverse, professionally annotated dataset. It substantially outperforms existing aesthetic predictors (LAION-AES, ArtiMuse, UniPercept) in generalization across diverse image categories.

Key advantages:

• Balanced predictions across photography, anime, design, everyday snapshots, and film photography
• No systematic bias toward specific image types (e.g., AI-generated content or black-and-white photos)
• Swiss-tournament based pairwise annotation for high-quality training labels
• Achieves 0.7445 SRCC and 0.7598 PLCC on ERIA-1K benchmark

🔍 Motivation

Off-the-shelf aesthetic predictors exhibit systematic biases:

| Model | Bias | |-------|------| | LAION-Aesthetic | Disproportionately high scores for AI-generated/anime content | | ArtiMuse | Overscores black-and-white photography and casual everyday snapshots | | UniPercept | Strong preference for monochrome images; overscores casual snapshots |

ERNIE-Image-Aes addresses these failure modes through a purpose-built annotation pipeline with explicit category balance.

📊 Results on ERIA-1K Benchmark

| Model | SRCC | PLCC | |-------|------|------| | LAION AES | 0.2944 | 0.3138 | | ArtiMuse | 0.4277 | 0.4704 | | UniPercept | 0.4533 | 0.4748 | | ERNIE-Image-Aes | 0.7445 | 0.7598 |

Annotation Protocol:

• Pairwise Swiss-system tournament for stable and reproducible rankings
• Tier labels from 1 to 10
• Annotators recruited from professional backgrounds (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Communication University of China, etc.)
• All annotators passed aesthetic calibration screening prior to participation

⚙️ Setup

Please follow the setup instructions in the ArtiMuse repository.

🙏 Acknowledgements

Our work builds upon ArtiMuse and InternVL-3. We sincerely thank the authors for their excellent contributions to the community.

✒️ Citation

If you find this work useful, please consider citing: