Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show progress across many visual–language tasks; however, their capacity to evaluate artistic expression remains limited: aesthetic concepts are inherently abstract and open-ended, and multimodal artwork annotations are scarce. We introduce KidsArtBench, a new benchmark of over 1k children’s artworks (ages 5-15) annotated by 12 expert educators across 9 rubric-aligned dimensions, together with expert comments for feedback. Unlike prior aesthetic datasets that provide single scalar scores on adult imagery, KidsArtBench targets children’s artwork and pairs multi-dimensional annotations with comment supervision to enable both ordinal assessment and formative feedback. Building on this resource, we propose an attribute-specific multi-LoRA approach – where each attribute corresponds to a distinct evaluation dimension (e.g., Realism, Imagination) in the scoring rubric – with Regression-Aware Fine-Tuning (RAFT) to align predictions with ordinal scales. On Qwen2.5-VL-7B, our method increases correlation from 0.468 to 0.653, with the largest gains on perceptual dimensions and narrowed gaps on higher-order attributes. Our results show that educator-aligned supervision and attribute-aware training yield pedagogically meaningful evaluations and establish a rigorous testbed for sustained progress in educational AI. We release data and code with ethics documentation.

Recent research has focused on investigating the psychological characteristics of Large Language Models (LLMs), emphasizing the importance of comprehending their behavioral traits. Likert scale personality questionnaires have become the primary tool for assessing these characteristics in LLMs. However, such scales can be skewed by factors such as social desirability, distorting the assessment of true personality traits. To address this issue, we firstly incorporate the forced-choice test, a method known for reducing response bias in human personality assessments, into the evaluation of LLM. Specifically, we evaluated six LLMs: Llama-3.1-8B, GLM-4-9B, GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-sonnet, and Deepseek-V3. We compared the Likert scale and forced-choice test results for LLMs’ Big Five personality scores, as well as their reliability. In addition, we looked at how temperature parameter and language affected LLM personality scores. The results show that the forced-choice test better captures differences between LLMs across various personality dimensions and is less influenced by temperature parameters. Furthermore, we found both broad trends and specific variations in personality scores across models and languages.