Dimension-Aware Active Annotation for Aesthetic Perception via Multi-Agent Human-AI Collaboration

To cultivate students' aesthetic development, teachers must objectively interpret and evaluate the artistic qualities and emotional resonance within their paintings—a process known as aesthetic perception. This evaluation process is labor-intensive and susceptible to biases due to variations among individual teachers. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) motivate the use of AI-driven models to automate and enhance this aesthetic perception task. However, building effective AI-driven aesthetic perception models requires extensive datasets, which are typically labor-intensive and costly to gather. To address this, we propose a novel framework that selectively identifies the most challenging dimensions of aesthetic perception for expert annotation, using AI-generated pseudo-annotations to reduce cost and improve model performance. Our framework integrates a multi-agent active learning strategy to systematically annotate scores across multiple dimensions of aesthetic perception. Initially, we train an aesthetic perception model using a small, manually annotated dataset, establishing primary annotation capabilities. Then, this trained model generates pseudo-annotations for unlabeled data across various aesthetic dimensions (e.g., humor, happiness). To ensure annotation quality and relevance, a multi-agent system evaluates these pseudo-annotations, identifying dimensions requiring expert human input based on metrics such as model estimation confidence. Human experts provide targeted annotations selectively, refining the dataset and guiding an iterative improvement cycle. Through repeated refinement, the model progressively enhances both its predictive accuracy and its automated annotation proficiency. Our optimization approach dynamically balances accuracy, annotation relevance, and human effort. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.