The ACM Multimedia 2026 Grand Challenge invites you to participate in the
AffectiveArt Challenge 2026: Fine-Grained Emotion Understanding and Generation in Artistic Images.
The Challenge of Affective Intelligence
With the scaling of large language models and the emergence of strong instruction-following agents, AI systems have made striking progress in logical reasoning and generation. Yet, these advances do not automatically translate into affective intelligence. Emotion understanding and artistic appreciation are rooted in subjective human experience, cultural context, and subtle perceptual cues.
In fine art, meaning is often conveyed indirectly through visual decisions—such as brushstroke rhythm, tonal contrast, color harmony, spatial tension, and compositional balance—rather than through explicit objects alone. Current generative models, largely trained on web-scale photographic data, tend to prioritize semantic correctness over affective coherence. They frequently treat emotion as a superficial style token, producing outputs that are semantically correct yet affectively ambiguous.
What Makes This Challenge Unique
Bridging this gap requires benchmarks connecting what is depicted with how emotion is expressed visually:
- Large-Scale Dataset: Built upon the EmoArt dataset with 132,664 artworks across 56 artistic styles.
- Hierarchical Annotations: Structured affective annotations including visual attributes (brushwork, composition, color, line, light) and therapeutic potential.
- Two Complementary Tracks: Focusing on both emotionally coherent synthesis (Track 1) and fine-grained affect recognition (Track 2).
🏆 Special Award: The top 2 performing teams from Track 1 and the top 1 performing team from Track 2 will be invited to submit papers recommended to the ACM Multimedia 2026 main conference.
For any inquiries regarding the challenge, please contact the organizing committee at
affectiveartchallenge2026@gmail.com.
Be Part of the Future
This challenge at ACM Multimedia 2026 aims to be a sustainable benchmark initiative advancing affective computing and emotion-aware artistic AI. This is your chance to push the boundaries—we can't wait to see what you create!
