The study, published in Frontiers in Communication by Areej Albawardi of Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University and Alyaa Olwi of King Abdulaziz University, is the first to trace the full remediation chain — original advertisement to AI-generated text to AI-generated image — through the lens of multimodal discourse analysis. The researchers selected six advertisements from Almarai, one of the largest dairy companies in Saudi Arabia and among the most valuable companies in the Middle East, recently posted on the company’s official Instagram page with more than ten thousand views each. The ads were chosen precisely because they carry a rich variety of Saudi cultural and social markers: traditional dress, family configurations, gender and age representation, and distinctly Saudi settings.

The experimental design was deceptively simple but technically revealing. Seven AI models — ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, Grok, Qwen, Leonardo AI and Recraft V3 — were each given the same instruction, “turn it into a text prompt,” producing forty-two textual descriptions. Then, using fresh accounts so the models would not rely on stored memory or context, the researchers fed those generated prompts back with the instruction “create an image.” Because Google and Leonardo AI each operate two image-generation submodels — Google Imagen 4 and Gemini 2.5 Flash (Nano Banana), and Leonardo’s Phoenix 1.0 and Lucid Origin — the image stage involved nine generators, yielding fifty-four images. Data collection took place between October 1 and November 1, 2025, using models ranked on Artificial Analysis’ Text-to-Image Leaderboard for accessibility and performance.

To ensure the qualitative judgments had a reliable empirical basis, the two authors independently coded each output against a shared framework, recording whether each model, advertisement and semiotic feature fulfilled a criterion. The coding produced 906 paired decisions — 420 for the image-to-text stage and 486 for the text-to-image stage. Observed agreement reached 91.94 percent, and Cohen’s kappa, which corrects for chance agreement, was 0.8319 — within the “almost perfect” band of the Landis and Koch categories. Alternative coefficients, including Krippendorff’s alpha, Scott’s pi and Gwet’s AC1, all exceeded 0.82, confirming that the coding framework was applied consistently in both directions of transformation.

The analytical framework drew on social semiotic technology, an extension of multimodal discourse analysis rooted in Halliday’s socio-semiotic approach and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design. Rather than treating AI as a neutral tool, the researchers viewed the models as semiotic technologies that actively shape meaning — echoing Lucy Suchman’s observation that AI works as a “disclosing agent for assumptions about the human.” The analysis identified recurring semiotic resources across the data: color, setting and location, people, action, cultural artifacts, language, intertextuality, logos, and modality, the degree of realism an image communicates through lighting, saturation and filters.

The results split cleanly along a technical fault line. Features that are visually salient and semantically explicit — color, people, action, setting — were transferred with high fidelity. Eight of the nine image generators produced correct colors, and most models accurately rendered the number, gender and activities of the people described in the prompts. Action verbs such as “placing,” “smiling” and “handing,” enriched with adverbs like “gently,” translated reliably into the final images. But features that are implicit, layered or linguistically encoded collapsed in transit. Camera angle and gaze direction were rarely described in the prompts, so generated images showed people looking the wrong way. Screen layering — the advertisement’s graphic plane superimposed on the photographic scene — was misread by several models, which rendered the Almarai sign as if it were physically hanging inside a supermarket rather than added as a logo.

Cultural representation proved the most consequential failure. The researchers found that AI models operate on concentric geographic circles — Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, Gulf, Saudi — and dress is represented or misrepresented according to the word chosen. Traditional Saudi clothing in the original advertisements was frequently replaced with Gulf, Palestinian or Pakistani garments. One model described “checkered keffiyehs” as “traditional Saudi Arabian attire,” although that specific garment belongs to Palestinian culture — a contradiction the authors link to what Zoe Hurley has called “image hallucination,” a distortion of reality in which cultural norms are misrepresented. In one generated image, a woman wears a red-and-white shemagh, a headpiece normally worn by men. Race was inferred from dress alone, so when the prompts lacked explicit racial description, models substituted Asian features for Saudi ones.

Language was an equally stark marker of the technology’s limits. Arabic script — the brand name in the logo and the Arabic slogan — was the lowest-scoring feature across all models. Most generators either removed the Arabic text entirely or filled the linguistic void with meaningless gibberish. Only ChatGPT correctly included Arabic textual elements in nearly all of its generated images, and only Qwen3-Max provided an accurate translation of the Arabic text while identifying the language as Arabic. Logos fared little better: none of the nine image generators reproduced the Almarai logo correctly, and several omitted it even when the prompt described it. Notably, Qwen3-Max produced the best textual prompts — averaging 159 to 303 words, rich in cultural and intertextual detail — yet failed to generate accurate images, while ChatGPT, whose prompts lacked detail, produced the best images, possibly because the model stores the input image in its database or draws on additional internet input.

The study also introduces a new conceptual tool: “text hallucination,” derived from Hurley’s taxonomy of image hallucination. Where image hallucination distorts visual reality, text hallucination describes inaccurate textual descriptions of objects or actions in uploaded images — as when one model described a man “holding a hard yellow hat” that does not exist in the original advertisement, which then materialized in the generated image. The authors identify three types: textual, cultural-perspective, and spatial, the last involving misplaced objects and anatomically distorted faces. Hallucinations appeared in the majority of models even when the textual prompts contained no misinformation, suggesting that the image generators themselves add, alter or misrepresent visual content. Only ChatGPT and Google Imagen produced images without any hallucinations.

The implications reach beyond the laboratory. Generative AI is projected to become a 1.3 trillion dollar market within a decade, and advertising agencies are already deploying AI-generated imagery in campaigns for brands like Casablanca, Valentino and Moncler. Advertisements do not merely communicate marketing messages; they create cultural experiences that carry social and ideological perspectives. In a market like Saudi Arabia, where companies deliberately ensure that advertising adheres to local traditions and represents culture accurately, the technology’s inability to render Arabic script, correct logos and authentic cultural dress is not a cosmetic flaw but a functional barrier. The authors argue that their findings carry weight for theories of multimodality and culture, and practical weight for AI developers, who must pay closer attention to scripts, languages and cultural specificity. As the models continue to evolve, the study offers a benchmark: fluency in color and composition is no longer enough. The next frontier for generative AI is cultural precision — the ability to see, and to show, the difference between an Arab advertisement and a Saudi one.

Subject of Research: AI and multimodal communication

Article Title: Cultural and multimodal realization in various AI models: text to image, image to text

Article References: Albawardi, A., & Olwi, A. (2026). Cultural and multimodal realization in various AI models: text to image, image to text. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1959385. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1959385

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1959385

Keywords: generative AI, multimodality, advertising, cultural representation, text-to-image, image-to-text, hallucination, semiotics, Cultural, multimodal, realization, various

The core problem the survey identifies is deceptively simple. Modern generative models—diffusion models that iteratively denoise random patterns into images, and autoregressive models that predict visual tokens one after another—are trained with surrogate objectives such as maximum likelihood estimation or reconstruction loss. These mathematical proxies measure how well a model reproduces its training data, but they say little about whether a generated video moves convincingly, whether a synthesized face looks beautiful, or whether a prompt asking for “a cat juggling on a bicycle” is actually satisfied. The consequences are familiar to anyone who has played with text-to-video systems: limbs that morph mid-stride, objects that float when they should fall, and scenes that drift semantically from the original request. Likelihood training simply was never designed to reward physical plausibility or aesthetic judgment.

Reinforcement learning offers a principled escape from this trap. Originally formulated to solve Markov decision processes—sequential decision problems in which an agent learns through trial and error to maximize cumulative reward—the framework can optimize objectives that are non-differentiable, preference-driven, or temporally structured. A human preference, a physics violation, or an aesthetic score can all be packaged as reward signals, even when no gradient can flow through them directly. The survey traces reinforcement learning’s conceptual evolution through four phases: first as a solver of well-defined decision problems using value-based methods like Q-learning and policy-based methods like REINFORCE; then as a family of specialized subfields including offline reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, risk-sensitive methods, and safe learning; then as a tool for learning environment dynamics and aligning with human intent; and finally as a general-purpose substrate for decision-making embedded within larger systems that combine planning, simulation, and feedback.

That final phase matters most for generative modeling. The landmark demonstration came from reinforcement learning with human feedback, the technique that turned a 1.3-billion-parameter language model fine-tuned on human preference rankings into a system that outperformed the original 175-billion-parameter GPT-3 at following instructions. The lesson generalized: instead of hand-crafting reward functions, researchers collect comparisons between outputs, train a reward model to predict those preferences, and then use reinforcement learning to push the generator toward highly rewarded behavior. For visual generation, this reframes vague goals like “make it look better” into concrete optimization problems. The same logic underpins world-model approaches such as Dreamer and MuZero, which learn internal simulators of their environments and plan within them—a strategy the survey links directly to the modern idea of generative models as learned simulators of visual reality.

In image generation, the survey organizes the methodological landscape into three families. Policy-based methods treat the denoising process of a diffusion model as a multi-step decision problem. Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization, or DDPO, and its cousin DPOK were early exemplars, using policy gradients with Kullback–Leibler regularization to improve both image quality and text-image alignment. More recently, Group Relative Policy Optimization, or GRPO—an algorithm introduced with DeepSeekMath—has been adapted with striking breadth: DanceGRPO unifies diffusion models and rectified flows under a single framework applicable to text-to-image, text-to-video, and image-to-video tasks, while Flow-GRPO reformulates flow-matching generation as a stochastic differential equation to enable effective exploration. A parallel family, Direct Preference Optimization or DPO, sidesteps explicit reward modeling entirely, treating alignment as a classification problem over ranked output pairs. Variants now address patch-level detail, personalization, safety through unlearning, curriculum learning, and even AI-generated preference labels that reduce dependence on costly human annotation.

Video generation poses harder challenges because time introduces motion inconsistency, semantic drift, and physical implausibility. Here the survey catalogs reinforcement learning deployed at every stage of the pipeline. At the sampling stage, AdaDiff learns an adaptive policy for choosing denoising step sizes, trading coarse updates for fine ones to accelerate generation without sacrificing fidelity. At the planning stage, systems like FLIP use actor-critic frameworks with dense feedback from vision-language models to select video clips that fulfill textual instructions, while RLAVE applies reinforcement learning to automatic editing, rewarding narrative coherence, pacing, and aesthetics. For alignment, VideoDPO, HuViDPO, and DenseDPO extend preference optimization with multi-dimensional rewards, patch-level feedback, and segment-level annotations. Perhaps most intriguingly, RDPO generates preference pairs automatically from real videos using physics-based heuristics—a ball that falls is preferred over one that floats—encoding physical plausibility without any human labeling. Phys-AR goes further, converting frames into symbolic tokens and rewarding trajectories that obey velocity consistency and mass-informed motion, producing parabolic arcs and realistic collisions.

The survey also highlights a subtle but consequential innovation: reinforcement learning applied at inference time rather than during training. The InfLVG system samples candidate continuations at each generation step, scores them with a composite reward balancing face identity consistency, prompt relevance, and artifact suppression, and updates its sampling policy on the fly. This lets the model extend generated videos to nine times their baseline length while maintaining coherence—an achievement that would be prohibitively expensive with conventional autoregressive sampling alone. Alongside these methods, reward fine-tuning approaches like InstructVideo and VADER, which supervise generators directly with differentiable reward gradients from expert models such as CLIP and object detectors, blur the boundary between classical reinforcement learning and gradient-based alignment, though the survey is careful to distinguish the two.

In three-dimensional content generation, reinforcement learning proves equally versatile. Early work voxelized shapes and rewarded topologically valid growth; recent systems operate on meshes, point clouds, neural radiance fields, and 3D Gaussian splatting. DeepMesh applies preference optimization to autoregressive mesh creation, while Mesh-RFT introduces topology-aware scoring metrics to refine flawed geometric regions automatically. DreamReward built a preference dataset of over twenty-five thousand prompt–asset pairs and trained a reward model that guides text-to-3D sampling; DreamDPO eliminates the reward model by exploiting large vision-language models as zero-shot judges. Addressing the notorious Janus problem, in which multi-view reconstructions show conflicting geometry, Carve3D fine-tunes diffusion models with a multi-view reconstruction consistency reward, and Nabla-R2D3 transforms two-dimensional reward signals into structured three-dimensional rewards through a probabilistic refinement mechanism. Domain-specific applications extend to point cloud completion, sequential indoor scene synthesis with physically constrained layouts, scene-aware human motion generation, and music-synchronized 3D dance through actor-critic GPT architectures.

The survey’s synthesis is that reinforcement learning has outgrown its role as a post-training trick and become a structural component of generative system design. It enables optimization of non-differentiable objectives, fine-grained sequential control, incorporation of temporal and physical feedback, and principled alignment with subjective human goals. The authors argue that preference-based paradigms like DPO have redefined the relationship between learning and generation, shifting the field from exploration-heavy training toward stable, sample-efficient alignment, and they anticipate a future of multi-objective, potentially multi-agent generation in which models must balance quality, diversity, safety, and efficiency simultaneously. Open challenges remain—reward hacking, annotation cost, generalization, and the scalability of preference data among them—but the trajectory is unmistakable. Generation is no longer conceived as a static mapping from input to output; it is an interactive, iterative, goal-driven process. As generative systems become more autonomous and user-facing, the capacity to learn from feedback and adapt to diverse human preferences, the authors conclude, will be indispensable—and reinforcement learning supplies the theoretical and algorithmic machinery to deliver it.

Subject of Research: Integration of reinforcement learning with visual generative models across image, video, and 3D content generation

Article Title: Integrating reinforcement learning with visual generative models: foundations and advances

Article References: Liang, Y., Fang, Y., Li, R., Ni, Z., Su, R., & Zhang, C. (2026). Integrating reinforcement learning with visual generative models: foundations and advances. Vicinagearth, 3(1), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44336-025-00030-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44336-025-00030-z

Keywords: reinforcement learning, generative models, diffusion models, direct preference optimization, video generation, 3D generation, human feedback, policy optimization, text-to-image, world models, physical consistency, multimodal learning