CREward: A Type-Specific Creativity Reward Model

Creativity is a complex phenomenon. When it comes to representing and assessing creativity, treating it as a single undifferentiated quantity would appear naive and underwhelming. In this work, we learn the first type-specific creativity reward model, coined CREward, which spans three creativity "axes," geometry, material, and texture, to allow us to view creativity through the lens of the image formation pipeline. To build our reward model, we first conduct a human benchmark evaluation to capture human perception of creativity for each type across various creative images. We then analyze the correlation between human judgments and predictions by large vision-language models (LVLMs), confirming that LVLMs exhibit strong alignment with human perception. Building on this observation, we collect LVLM-generated labels to train our CREward model that is applicable to both evaluation and generation of creative images. We explore three applications of CREward: creativity assessment, explainable creativity, and creative sample acquisition for both human design inspiration and guiding creative generation through low-rank adaptation. Code and dataset are available at https://han-j-y.github.io/creward_prj/.