Abstract4D: A Large-Scale Dataset and Framework for Understanding the Visual Language of Abstract Art
Haowei Zhang, Yuanpei Zhao, Ji-Zhe Zhou, Mao Li
Abstract
Artificial intelligence can classify artistic styles and synthesize images, but it still lacks a model of the visual language that gives art meaning. Abstract painting minimizes object semantics and foregrounds structural cues, making it an ideal testbed for computational perception. We introduce \textbf{Abstract4D}, the largest dataset of abstract paintings to date: more than 120,000 images paired with rich metadata and multi-dimensional prompts that capture each work's perceptual attributes---\textit{form, color, texture, and composition}. Annotations are produced by a hybrid human--VLM pipeline for quality and consistency. Using Abstract4D, we (i) analyze the semantic structure of abstract art through large-scale embedding visualization, uncovering how perceptual relationships organize artistic meaning, and (ii) establish benchmark tasks for classification, cross-modal retrieval, and text-to-image generation to evaluate how AI models perceive and reproduce abstract visual language. Together, these analyses demonstrate how Abstract4D enables both exploration and quantitative assessment of AI's ability to represent and interpret abstract art.