Lines Are Ideas: Visual Creativity Assessment in Hyperbolic Space

Abstract:Assessing human creativity from drawings provides a scalable way to evaluate human creative ability. However, existing approaches either rely on costly expert annotation or treat creativity as a single regression target, overlooking its underlying structure. Psychological theories have long emphasized that creativity emerges from balancing novelty and appropriateness. Motivated by this principle, we recast creativity as structured semantic deviation between paired drawings, where novelty measures the extent of departure from the original base sketch, and appropriateness determines whether such departures remain meaningful. This formulation naturally leads to a hyperbolic representation, in which novelty is quantified by geodesic distance and appropriateness is evaluated conditionally via a learned decision boundary, further regulated by an abstraction-conditioned adaptive constraint. Experiments on AuDrA-Drawings demonstrate state-of-the-art alignment with expert judgments and strong robustness under rater and task shifts. Beyond performance gains, our framework reveals an interpretable radial organization of creative variation, offering a principled geometric foundation for automatic creativity assessment. Submission history Access Paper: View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source Additional Features Audio Summary Current browse context: References & Citations Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Bookmark Institution arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.