CREATE: Creativity Evaluation of VLMs using the Visual Remote Associates Test
Vision language models (VLMs) are used in creative tasks such as visual storytelling, design ideation, art interpretation, and advertising. Yet we lack principled ways to measure the lateral reasoning of these models compared to human potential. We introduce CREATE, a semi-automatically constructed benchmark containing 155 visual Remote Associates Test problems. These problems require a solver to find an underlying connection among three seemingly dissimilar images. We conduct a human study (N=25) to validate and ground the quality of our benchmark, and evaluate 11 VLMs. Our findings show that most VLMs underperform humans on this task. Our experiments indicate that the associative abilit...
| Authors | Ziqing Yang, Anubhav Jangra, Smaranda Muresan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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