Beauty is in the AI of the beholder: MLLMs systematically overrate facial attractiveness

Santiago Grandas; Juan Sebastian Cely-Acosta; Mohit Mendiratta; Shafee Hassan; Macken Murphy

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2609.02512

Beauty is in the AI of the beholder: MLLMs systematically overrate facial attractiveness

Santiago Grandas·Juan Sebastian Cely-Acosta·Mohit Mendiratta·Shafee Hassan·Macken Murphy

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Beauty assessments from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly popular amongst users, companies, and aestheticians. This raises the question of whether these AI models can accurately reflect human judgments of attractiveness. In a pre- registered exploratory study, we compared the attractiveness ratings of 2,513 human participants to four widely used commercial AI models: Claude, Gemini, GPT, and Grok. Results showed that MLLMs systematically rate faces more favourably and within a narrower range than humans and, at the time of study, do not reproduce human ratings in absolute terms. However, MLLMs exhibit strong correlations with human attractiveness judgments, accurately tracking the rank-ordering of faces. MLLMs may judge faces by different cues than humans; only face age was a predictor of facial attractiveness in both humans and MLLMs, with inconsistent patterns across models for ethnicity and gender. AI models strongly agree with one another, except for Grok, which also showed the lowest agreement with humans. Our findings suggest that while they may be able to approximate rank-orderings of human attractiveness, current off-the-shelf commercial MLLMs systematically overrate the beauty of human faces.

Explore related subjects

cs.CV cs.HC

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Santiago Grandas, Juan Sebastian Cely-Acosta, Mohit Mendiratta, Shafee Hassan, Macken Murphy. 2026-09-02. Beauty is in the AI of the beholder: MLLMs systematically overrate facial attractiveness. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02512

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

Discover connections

cs.CV subject cs.HC subject

Connections use source metadata and explicit phrase matches, not verified experimental comparisons.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

MM-SVGEdit: A Multimodal-Driven SVG Editing for UI Design

In the field of UI design, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is widely used as a design medium. However, traditional SVG editing techniques have high entry barriers and require cumbersome manual iteration, while LLM-based editing solutions suffer from low accuracy and poor user controllability. To address these issues, we propose MM-SVGEdit, a multimodal-driven SVG editing approach that integrates traditional SVG editing and LLM-based methods. We introduce a two-stage strategy in which visual grounding is followed by modification. Both stages support two interaction modalities: natural language instructions and direct manipulation (mouse and keyboard). We trained and evaluated MM-SVGEdit on a self-constructed dataset of 14,476 question-answer pairs generated from UIs, covering 11 types of editing operations on both single and multiple UI targets. The results show that MM-SVGEdit improves SVG editing accuracy, efficiency, and user-perceived control while reducing token consumption and response time.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Do Depressive Facial Patterns Transfer Across Cultures and Contexts? Evidence from a German RCT and E-DAIC

Automated assessment of depression from facial dynamics holds promise for scalable mental health monitoring, yet cross-corpus generalization of learned biomarkers remains an open challenge. We present a systematic bidirectional transfer study pairing the EmpkinS-EKSpression randomized controlled trial (RCT; N = 256, SCID-5-CV diagnoses) with the Extended Distress Analysis Interview Corpus (E-DAIC; N = 275, semi-structured clinical interviews), predicting depression severity and binary diagnostic status from facial action units, head pose, and gaze. Cross-corpus binary classification proves more robust than continuous PHQ-8 severity regression, with forward transfer achieving AUC = 0.70. Regression transfer is governed by functional context alignment: passive observation phases yield the most transferable models, while active emotion regulation phases elicit stronger within-corpus signals. These findings establish functional context alignment as the primary determinant of cross-corpus generalization, with passive elicitation contexts offering the best trade-off between within-corpus sensitivity and cross-corpus robustness.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

No Pixel Left Behind: Filling Gaps in Anime Colorization

Animation production workflows often involve digital colorization of line art, where small unpainted regions ("gaps") frequently occur and remain an underexplored challenge. We conducted a formative study in Japanese animation (anime) pipelines and found that while the paint bucket tool is widely used for base coloring, tiny enclosed areas are frequently overlooked, resulting in time-consuming manual detection and filling. We introduce GapFill, a tool grounded in professional practices that reduces the effort of gap detection, zooming, and color selection. Our deep-learning method suggests appropriate fill colors by referencing surrounding regions, leveraging the flat-color nature of anime-style images. In a user study with 13 professional colorists, our system improved performance and usability in gap-filling tasks over conventional methods. The study also suggested that prediction accuracy alone is not the primary factor for usability, that appropriate colors can be contextually ambiguous, and that GapFill can complement existing tools depending on users' trust in new AI-powered assistance.

cs.HC↗