From Style Replication to Style Exploration: Enabling Art Style Exploration with Analyze-Experiment-Resituate Framework

Generative AI is becoming an important medium for artistic creation, yet existing interactions often assume that creators can specify intentions in advance and accurately communicate them through text prompts. Artistic intentions, however, may be vague, latent, or recognizable only after seeing concrete visual possibilities. We propose a human-AI co-creation paradigm beyond explicit intent expression. By expanding model exploration, we expose artists to diverse visual possibilities, allowing them to identify previously unarticulated preferences through observation, comparison, and selection. We then integrate artists' curatorial judgments into reinforcement learning, assigning different learning strengths based on preferences over generation trajectories, so recognized directions are more strongly reinforced and the model gradually adapts to individual aesthetics. This creates a continuous "explore-identify-shape-re-explore" loop in which artistic intent is progressively discovered, externalized, and shaped. Through three user studies, we examine latent-preference discovery, personalized preference alignment, and the externalization of vague, difficult-to-express creative intentions.

Understanding how artworks are created requires reasoning about the iterative decisions, material operations, and contextual influences that shape artistic production. While recent generative AI systems can synthesize artworks with high fidelity, they primarily model distributions over finished artifacts rather than the creative processes underlying their creation. In practice, artistic workflows are only partially documented through fragmented sources such as archival records, preparatory studies, correspondence, etc., making process-level understanding difficult to formalize computationally. In this work, we introduce ArtMine, a framework for discovering and formalizing artistic processes from heterogeneous historical evidence. Our approach synthesizes heterogeneous artwork evidence into a structured repository, from which a Peircean abductive agent infers evidence-grounded production steps. These steps are converted into a compositional graph and rendering prompt, then optimized through self-reflection over deviations between the generated and reference artworks. We provide a preliminary proof-of-concept case study using open-domain historical sources across multiple artists and artistic movements, demonstrating that fragmented documentary evidence can support coherent, interpretable, and auditable representations of artistic workflows. By modeling creative processes rather than only final artifacts, our work moves toward process-centred human-AI co-creativity systems that can support artistic interpretation, creative education, reflective collaboration, and computational studies of cultural production.

Attributing an artwork to an artist has traditionally relied on detailed visual observations and descriptions, known as stylistic analysis in art history. By contrast, current artificial intelligence (AI) models used in the field offer only unexplained probabilistic classifications. To bridge this methodological gap, we present an AI framework that automates stylistic analysis of paintings, providing a foundation for enhancing evidence collection, discovery, and verification. By training a vision transformer (ViT) on a large corpus of paintings with metadata, our system encodes this art history-specific data as embeddings. These representations are factorized via sparse dictionary learning into a shared set of features that recur across the training set. A large language model (LLM) then interprets each feature by retrieving associated artworks and their accompanying curator-written texts, and synthesizes them into descriptions that reflect their stylistic attributes. Finally, an autonomous coordinator LLM applies a reasoning-and-action (ReAct) framework to weight, test, and refine these features into cohesive descriptions of an artwork, or comparisons of artworks. This approach converts detailed visual features into descriptive terms, addressing a key challenge in art history. It thus connects the use of images as data with the semantic concerns of humanists, establishing vision-based computational art history as an area for future growth.