RubricRM introduces a pairwise generative reward modeling framework that generates an input‑specific rubric—comprising evaluation dimensions, weights, and scoring criteria—to score candidate images. The method is trained in two stages: supervised fine‑tuning to learn the rubric‑based scoring paradigm and GRPO to refine dimension‑level rewards. Experiments on text‑to‑image generation and instruction‑based image editing benchmarks demonstrate that RubricRM outperforms existing specialized reward models and competes with strong proprietary MLLM judges while using smaller backbones.
By Zijian Kan, Wei Wang, Long Luo, Bing Zhao, Xuan Ren, Weixu Qiao, Wenbo Li, Hu Wei, Lin Qu
arXiv:2609.37372v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Visual reward models are essential for evaluating and improving visual generation models, yet existing approaches typically map task conditions and can...
By Xuehai Bai, Zhenchen Tang, Yang Shi, Dianyi Wang, Tengfei Liu, Wanshun Su, Xuanyu Zhu, Ruohui Wang, Haiwen Diao, Haotian Wang, Xiaoling Gu, Yuanxing Zhang
The paper introduces Objective-aware Trajectory Credit Assignment (OTCA), a framework that refines reinforcement learning for diffusion-based visual generation. OTCA decomposes credit across denoising steps and allocates multiple reward signals adaptively, addressing the coarse, uniform reward assignment of existing GRPO pipelines. Experiments demonstrate that OTCA consistently enhances image and video generation quality across various metrics.
By Rui Li, Ke Hao, Yuanzhi Liang, Haibin Huang, Chi Zhang, Yun Gu, Xuelong Li
The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can be effectively applied to diffusion models for visual tasks, focusing on the role of likelihood estimation. By systematically separating policy‑gradient objectives, likelihood estimators, and rollout sampling schemes, the authors find that using an evidence lower bound (ELBO) based likelihood estimator computed from the final generated sample is the key factor for stable and efficient RL optimization, outweighing the choice of loss function. Experiments on SD 3.5 Medium across multiple reward benchmarks confirm that this approach improves GenEval scores from 0.24 to 0.95 in 90 GPU hours, outperforming existing methods such as FlowGRPO and the current state‑of‑the‑art without reward hacking.
By Jaemoo Choi, Yuchen Zhu, Wei Guo, Petr Molodyk, Bo Yuan, Jinbin Bai, Yi Xin, Molei Tao, Yongxin Chen
arXiv:2606. 27608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Qwen-Image-2.
By Yixian Xu, Kaiyuan Gao, Yuxiang Chen, Yilei Chen, Zecheng Tang, Zihao Liu, Zikai Zhou, Deqing Li, Hao Meng, Kuan Cao, Jiahao Li, Jie Zhang, Liang Peng, Lihan Jiang, Ningyuan Tang, Shengming Yin, Tianhe Wu, Xiaoyue Chen, Yan Shu, Yanran Zhang, Yi Wang, Yu Wu, Yujia Wu, Zekai Zhang, Zhendong Wang, Xiao Xu, Kun Yan, Chenfei Wu
The paper introduces Reflection-Aware GRPO (RA‑GRPO), a reinforcement‑learning framework that aligns diffusion generative models with human preferences. It uses Diffusion Reflection to correct intermediate sampling paths by reversing the diffusion process, and Counterfactual Path Synthesis to embed these corrected trajectories into the policy, avoiding extra inference cost. Experiments on text‑to‑image and text‑to‑video models show RA‑GRPO outperforms existing methods, reducing reward hacking and improving generalization while remaining architecture‑agnostic.
By Junlong Wu, Jiuzhou Lin, Jia Sun, Boheng Zhang, Huaiqing Wang, Dewen Fan, Houde Liu, Qianqian Gan, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao
Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing video generation models, with a robust reward model (RM) serving as the cornerstone. However, existing video reward models often produce unstable sc...
arXiv:2601.03468v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard approach for post-training large language models and, more recently, for improving image generati...
By Yunqi Hong, Kuei-Chun Kao, Hengguang Zhou, Cho-Jui Hsieh
arXiv:2609.22947v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing video generation models, with a robust reward model (RM) serving as the cornerstone. However, exist...
By Zhenchen Tang, Yang Li, Songlin Yang, Bo Peng, Xiaotong Zhao, Shuai Li, Haotian Fan, Alan Zhao, Jing Dong
AdaPilot introduces a scene-adaptive, cross-generator policy for optimizing text-to-image generation quality. By framing multi-turn image generation as a Markov Decision Process and using reinforcement learning, it decouples the policy from specific generator internals, incorporates scene-aware and process-level rewards, and achieves superior quality and generalization compared to baselines. Experiments demonstrate that a single AdaPilot policy can transfer zero‑shot to unseen generators while consistently improving performance across all evaluated models.
By Wenjin Liu, Fayuan Ke, Yue Lu, Zhe Cui, Anh Tuan Luu, Haoran Luo
arXiv:2608.22780v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables direct preference optimization for image editing through editing-specific rewards, which remain less developed due...
By Qichao Ma, Jikang Cheng, Ling Liang, Zhaofei Yu, Tiejun Huang, Renye Yan
Swift-Image is a compact unified model that performs text-to-image generation, single-image editing, and multi-image editing using a 6B parameter DiT architecture. It employs a progressive training pipeline, parallel expert reinforcement learning, and multi-teacher distillation to balance diverse objectives, while a Prompt Enhancer decouples high-level reasoning from pixel-level rendering. After training, structural pruning and few-step distillation produce efficient 3B and accelerated variants that maintain near‑lossless performance and improve editing efficiency.
By Taihang Hu, Zhao Wang, Zuan Gao, Tao Liu, Hao Yan, Zhengze Xu, Yuhang Yu, Yongchao Du, Xingjian Wang, Jun Zheng, Qinye Zhou, Yaqi Cai, Zhengrui Chen, Chao Lin, Yefeng Shen, Yuan Wang, Zhengtao Wu, Ge Wu, Xiaoli Xu, Denghui Yang, Huayu Zhang, Mingzhou Zhang, Mengting Chen