Open-ended aesthetic critique is a challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs): unlike multiple-choice aesthetic benchmarks, it has no single correct answer, and most aesthetic evaluation has measured models against numeric scores rather than the written critiques people actually give. We evaluate MLLM critiques against ranked human references and ask whether they are close to human ones. Using the Reddit Photo Critique Dataset, we score five open-weight MLLMs against multiple ranked human critiques per photo with reference-based similarity metrics, under six prompt conditions that disentangle persona framing, aspect hinting, length control, and single- versus multi-pass generation, and add an image-grounding control that feeds each model the wrong photograph. We find that reference-based similarity gives a misleading picture. Stricter lexical and learned metrics show only weak alignment with human critiques, while a coarse embedding cosine reports broad topical overlap that the grounding control traces to a stable house style rather than image-specific observation. Behaviorally, the models diverge from humans in consistent ways the scores do not surface: even under a length cap they write two to three times as much, cover nearly every aesthetic aspect where humans are selective, engage each aspect more uniformly and at greater depth, and repeat themselves across critiques of the same photo where humans vary. We argue that reference-based similarity rewards a fluent, comprehensive critique style rather than the selectivity and specificity of human critique, and discuss implications for evaluating and training open-ended multimodal generation.
Sign languages are compositional systems where meaning arises by combining sublexical phonological parameters, such as handshape, location, and movement. While deep learning models for Sign Language Recognition (SLR) have achieved increased performance on translation benchmarks, it remains unclear whether these models distinguish abstract phonological features or merely rely on low-level statistical correlations. This work evaluates the phonological perception of SLR models trained on American Sign Language (ASL) by probing phonological sensitivity using minimal pairs and evaluating representational alignment with human behavioral data. Our results reveal that SLR models exhibit emergent phonological sensitivity, but with clear architectural trade-offs: pose-based models are sensitive to handshape contrasts, while pixel-based models better capture location changes. Furthermore, pose-based models learn latent representations that correlate with human perceptual similarity judgments (r~0.49). These findings suggest that while SLR models exhibit emergent phonology, current training paradigms are insufficient to scale them beyond their architectural inductive biases.
Alvin Wei Ming Tan, David Cardinal, Tania Lorido-Botran +3cs.LG
Given the inherently multimodal nature of human experience, vision-language models (VLMs) hold substantial promise for modeling human cognition as it grows and develops with experience. Realizing their potential requires tools for comparing VLMs with human cognitive development across tasks, ages, and populations. We present LEVANTE-bench, a benchmark based on tasks and data from the Learning Variability Network (LEVANTE), which distributes open-source tasks and data measuring children's cognition across languages and cultures. In LEVANTE-bench, we systematically assess VLMs on six tasks, comparing their alignment with children aged 5-12 ($N$ = 1547) across three countries. We compare models at multiple scales, assessing their overall accuracy, their task- and item-level alignment with children, and how well they match children's trial-level error distributions. Alignment was heterogeneous across scales: at the level of tasks and items, more capable models aligned better with humans. However, match to human error distributions varied widely across tasks, and for several tasks, smaller models matched younger children's errors better. In addition, even the best-performing VLMs struggled on matrix reasoning and mental rotation tasks. Thus, current VLM architectures align only partially with the cognitive abilities of children.