Can Language Models Imagine Without Seeing? Ekphrasis: Measuring Visual Creative Ideation in Text-Only LLMs
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2608.06967 (cs)
[Submitted on 7 Aug 2026]
Title:Can Language Models Imagine Without Seeing? Ekphrasis: Measuring Visual Creative Ideation in Text-Only LLMs
Authors:Hongyu Luo, He Wang, Huihao Jing, Hong Ting Tsang, Yuxuan Liu, Wuganjing Song, Yauwai Yim, Chunyang Li, Yangqiu Song
View a PDF of the paper titled Can Language Models Imagine Without Seeing? Ekphrasis: Measuring Visual Creative Ideation in Text-Only LLMs, by Hongyu Luo and 8 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract: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 Graphs to convert task-specific population clichés into novelty references. Across 14 language models, VCI separates usefulness, expressiveness, and novelty rather than reducing to fluency: strong models achieve similar overall scores through different profiles, and useful plans can remain visually clichéd. A cross-modal grounding study further shows that text-level VCI ordering largely survives faithful rendering and blind image-level preference judgment, supporting Ekphrasis as a measure of visual ideation beyond prose quality.
| Comments: | 25 pages, 4 main figures, with appendices. Code and data: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.06967 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.06967v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.06967
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled Can Language Models Imagine Without Seeing? Ekphrasis: Measuring Visual Creative Ideation in Text-Only LLMs, by Hongyu Luo and 8 other authors
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.