On Semiotic-Grounded Interpretive Evaluation of Generative Art

TL;DR

This paper introduces SemJudge, a novel semiotic-based evaluator for generative art that assesses symbolic and indexical meanings, aligning more closely with human interpretation than existing methods.

Contribution

The work formalizes a Peircean semiotic framework for evaluating generative art and develops SemJudge, which captures deeper symbolic and indexical meanings in art evaluation.

Findings

SemJudge aligns more closely with human judgments than prior evaluators.

User studies show SemJudge produces deeper artistic interpretations.

SemJudge advances evaluation from surface-level quality to symbolic and indexical understanding.

Abstract

Interpretation is essential to deciphering the language of art: audiences communicate with artists by recovering meaning from visual artifacts. However, current Generative Art (GenArt) evaluators remain fixated on surface-level image quality or literal prompt adherence, failing to assess the deeper symbolic or abstract meaning intended by the creator. We address this gap by formalizing a Peircean computational semiotic theory that models Human-GenArt Interaction (HGI) as cascaded semiosis. This framework reveals that artistic meaning is conveyed through three modes - iconic, symbolic, and indexical - yet existing evaluators operate heavily within the iconic mode, remaining structurally blind to the latter two. To overcome this structural blindness, we propose SemJudge. This evaluator explicitly assesses symbolic and indexical meaning in HGI via a Hierarchical Semiosis Graph (HSG) that reconstructs the meaning-making process from prompt to generated artifact. Extensive quantitative experiments show that SemJudge aligns more closely with human judgments than prior evaluators on an interpretation-intensive fine-art benchmark. User studies further demonstrate that SemJudge produces deeper, more insightful artistic interpretations, thereby paving the way for GenArt to move beyond the generation of "pretty" images toward a medium capable of expressing complex human experience. Project page: https://github.com/songrise/SemJudge.