Can Language Models Imagine Without Seeing? Ekphrasis: Measuring Visual Creative Ideation in Text-Only LLMs
Current evaluations do not isolate whether text-only language models can originate visual concepts before image generation. Fluent visual prose can hide visual-plan failures: an answer may appear creative while repeating familiar visual clichés or failing to specify a renderable scene. We define Visual Creative Ideation (VCI) as the ability to produce textual visual plans that are useful, expressive, and population-novel, and introduce Ekphrasis, a 400-task benchmark spanning Abstraction, Combination, Transformation, and Adaptation. Ekphrasis scores anonymized pairwise comparisons with dimension-specific checklists, aggregates preferences with Bradley-Terry models, and uses Typed Idea Gra...
| Authors | Hongyu Luo, He Wang, Huihao Jing et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 7 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 August 2026 |
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