Universal Aesthetic Alignment

01 — Overview

Overview

Image-generation systems are commonly optimized toward a broad, average notion of visual appeal. This paper argues that the same preference can conflict with user intent when a request deliberately calls for abstraction, discomfort, visual roughness, or other non-mainstream aesthetics.

The authors call this reversed alignment: instead of adapting to the user’s stated aesthetic goal, the system steers the output back toward the developer’s preferred visual norm.

02 — Contributions

Key Contributions

• 01

  Frames universal aesthetic optimization as an alignment and user-autonomy problem rather than only an image-quality concern.

• 02

  Builds a wide-spectrum aesthetics benchmark for testing whether generators follow unconventional visual instructions.

• 03

  Studies generation, image-to-image editing, reward-model scoring, and the treatment of recognized abstract artworks.

03 — Method

Method

The study expands ordinary image descriptions with controlled wide-spectrum aesthetic attributes, compares generated outputs against those requests, and evaluates how aesthetic reward models score prompt-following but conventionally unattractive images. It also tests image editing and real artworks to separate prompt adherence from generic beauty preference.

04 — Evaluation

Results

Across the evaluated generators and reward models, the study finds a recurring preference for conventionally polished imagery. Systems often beautify or sanitize deliberately unconventional requests, while reward models can penalize outputs that follow those requests more faithfully.

05 — Reference

Citation

@InProceedings{Guo_2026_AestheticAlignment,
  author    = {Guo, Wenqi Marshall and Qian, Qingyun and Hasan, Khalad and Du, Shan},
  title     = {Position: Universal Aesthetic Alignment Narrows Artistic Expression},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Position Track Spotlight},
  url       = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=1gQ4zc1Q8I}
}