Optimizing Aesthetic Perception Through Human–AI Teaming for Subtle Dimension Identification in Art Annotation

Abstract

Aesthetic perception, the cognitive process through which individuals interpret and evaluate the expressive and emotional qualities of visual art, is fundamental to students' creative and emotional development. Recent progress in artificial intelligence has enabled computational models to assist in aesthetic analysis by identifying patterns in visual composition and affective expression. However, such models often struggle to recognize abstract or context-dependent aesthetic dimensions, and improving these aspects through comprehensive annotation remains costly and time-consuming. This study presents a human–AI teaming framework designed to identify the aesthetic perception dimensions that AI models find most difficult to interpret and to allocate these dimensions to human experts for annotation. The framework employs a multiagent reinforcement learning mechanism, where each agent is assigned to a specific aesthetic dimension and learns a policy for determining whether expert annotation is required. Two complementary state representation strategies are introduced: a statistical representation that captures the model's predictive distribution across dimensions, and a graph-based attention module that models interdependencies among aesthetic attributes. A reward mechanism further guides agents to balance the improvement of model perception with the minimization of human annotation effort. Experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively identifies the challenging dimensions for AI models and strategically delegates them for human evaluation. This targeted collaboration significantly enhances annotation efficiency and model interpretability, providing a scalable approach for improving human–AI synergy in aesthetic perception analysis.