AcT2I-Prompts

What is this?

AcT2I-Prompts is the core prompt set from the AcT2I benchmark. It contains 125 base action-centric prompts that describe interactions between two animal agents (e.g. "a goose competing for dominance with a turkey") plus 3 enriched variants per base prompt:

• spatial_prompt
• emotional_prompt
• temporal_prompt

Each base prompt is also labeled along semantic axes:

• rarity_label (how biologically/common the interaction is)
• emotional_valence (aggressive / defensive / affiliative / communicative)
• spatial_topology (pursuit vs physical contact vs distant interaction)
• temporal_extent (instantaneous vs extended action)

Total rows: 125 (one per base prompt). Each row includes all 4 textual variants.

This repo intentionally does not include generated images or human study results. Those are released separately.

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Intended use

This dataset is for evaluation / analysis of text-to-image models, not for training.

Typical use:

1. For each row, take the base_prompt and (optionally) the enriched spatial_prompt, emotional_prompt, and temporal_prompt.
2. Generate images from your T2I model for each variant.
3. Measure whether the model's image actually depicts the described interaction and action.

These prompts are meant to stress-test spatial, temporal, and affective reasoning ("who is doing what to whom, in what posture, with what intent, at what moment").

Out-of-scope / disallowed use

This dataset is not intended for:

• Training or promoting violent / graphic animal content for shock or harassment.
• Generating deceptive media presented as "real" wildlife attacks or staged cruelty.
• Drawing conclusions about human social behavior, human interpersonal violence, or human identity bias. The benchmark is deliberately animal–animal and two-agent focused.

Do not use this dataset to build abusive content pipelines.

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Data fields

Each row in data/prompts.jsonl represents one base interaction scenario.

• id (int)
• base_prompt (str)
• animal1 (str)
• animal2 (str)
• action (str)
• rarity_label (str: frequent | rare | very_rare)
• emotional_valence (str: aggressive | defensive | affiliative | communicative)
• spatial_topology (str: proximal-contact | pursuit / avoidance | distant interaction)
• temporal_extent (str: instantaneous | extended action)
• spatial_prompt (str)
• emotional_prompt (str)
• temporal_prompt (str)

There are no train/dev/test splits. All 125 rows are considered the official evaluation set.

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Dataset creation

Curation rationale

Most existing "compositional" prompts test simple attribute binding ("a blue cat on a skateboard"). AcT2I instead targets interaction semantics: chasing, comforting, retaliating, asserting dominance, surrendering, etc. These require:

• asymmetric roles (one agent acts on the other),
• physically plausible contact / pursuit / restraint poses,
• temporal cues (in the middle of an attack vs after being struck),
• emotional / intent cues (aggressive vs affiliative).

We focus on animal–animal interactions (instead of human–human violence or human identity scenarios) to:

1. Reduce sensitive social/ethical risk around representing harm between humans.
2. Get clearer signal about action depiction instead of immediately running into "the model can't draw human hands" failures.

How prompts were generated

• We defined pairs of animals and an interaction verb (e.g. "competing for dominance with", "comforting", "chasing", "retaliating against").

• We wrote a concise base_prompt for each interaction.

• For each base prompt, we produced three enriched variants:

  • spatial_prompt: adds explicit body orientation / physical layout.
  • emotional_prompt: adds affect / intent wording.
  • temporal_prompt: anchors the scene in a specific moment or phase of action.

• We assigned semantic labels (rarity_label, emotional_valence, spatial_topology, temporal_extent) to each base prompt.

Who created the data

All prompts, enriched variants, and semantic labels were authored/verified by the AcT2I team. No personal names, locations, or other PII were included.

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Bias, risks, and limitations

• Violence / aggression content: Many prompts explicitly describe aggression, dominance, pursuit, or threat between animals. This is intentional (models struggle most with these high-contact, asymmetric actions). However, it means the dataset can be used to generate violent-looking content. Please use responsibly.

• Scope limitations: The benchmark is animal–animal only and two-agent only. Results should not be overgeneralized to human social interactions, medical scenarios, multi-agent scenes, tool use, etc.

• Biological plausibility: Some interactions are biologically rare or borderline impossible. That is deliberate: we care about whether the model can depict the requested interaction clearly, not whether the interaction is common in nature.

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Citation

If you use AcT2I-Prompts, please cite:

@article{malaviya2025act2i,
  title={AcT2I: Evaluating and Improving Action Depiction in Text-to-Image Models},
  author={Malaviya, Vatsal and Chatterjee, Agneet and Patel, Maitreya and Yang, Yezhou and Baral, Chitta},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.16141},
  year={2025}
}