# AIM-Bench: Benchmarking and Improving Affective Image Manipulation via Fine-Grained Hierarchical Control Source: [AIM-Bench: Benchmarking and Improving Affective Image Manipulation via Fine-Grained Hierarchical Control]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-04-15T05:00:11.244Z Authors: Shi Chen, Xuecheng Wu, Heli Sun, Yunyun Shi, Xinyi Yin, Fengjian Xue, Jinheng Xie, Dingkang Yang, Hao Wang, Junxiao Xue, Liang He Published: 2026-04-12T04:32:30.000Z ## Abstract Affective Image Manipulation (AIM) aims to evoke specific emotions through targeted editing. Current image editing benchmarks primarily focus on object-level modifications in general scenarios, lacking the fine-grained granularity to capture affective dimensions. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first benchmark designed for AIM termed AIM-Bench. This benchmark is built upon a dual-path affective modeling scheme that integrates the Mikels emotion taxonomy with the Valence-Arousal-Dominance framework, enabling high-level semantic and fine-grained continuous manipulation. Through a hierarchical human-in-the-loop workflow, we finally curate 800 high-quality samples covering 8 emotional categories and 5 editing types. To effectively assess performance, we also design a composite evaluation suite combining rule-based and model-based metrics to holistically assess instruction consistency, aesthetics, and emotional expressiveness. Extensive evaluations reveal that current editing models face significant challenges, most notably a prevalent positivity bias, which stemming from inherent imbalances in training data distribution. To tackle this, we propose a scalable data engine utilizing an inverse repainting strategy to construct AIM-40k, a balanced instruction-tuning dataset comprising 40k samples. Concretely, we enhance raw affective images via generative redrawing to establish high-fidelity ground truths, and synthesize input images with divergent emotions and paired precise instructions. Fine-tuning a baseline model on AIM-40k yields a 9.15% relative improvement in overall performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of our AIM-40k. Our data and related code will be made open soon. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Affective Image Manipulation on AIM](): Affective Image Manipulation; AIM; CLIP-T: 0.2201. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()