This paper presents an overview of the inaugural PortraitCraft Challenge, held as one of the official competitions at CVPR 2026. The challenge focuses on portrait composition understanding and generation, aiming to advance AI research in portrait aesthetics analysis and controllable image synthesis.
arXiv:2606. 08841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly deployed in open-ended creative contexts, yet their outputs remain impersonal, optimized for aggregate aesthetics rather than individual taste.
By Harini SI, Somesh Singh, Yaman Kumar Singla, David Doermann, Rajiv Ratn Shah
AesCanvas is a new dataset and benchmark that evaluates image aesthetic models on two fronts: CritiqueCanvas, which contains 519,136 instruction–response pairs for long‑form, multi‑dimensional critique across photography, painting, and virtual imagery, and ContextCanvas, which offers 301 expert‑reviewed use scenarios to assess contextual aesthetic suitability. The benchmark tests closed‑source, open‑weight general, and aesthetic‑specific multimodal large language models, revealing that models excel at critique generation but lag in context‑sensitive judgment. The study shows that aesthetic specialization does not reliably transfer to contextual suitability and highlights the need for culturally situated, evidence‑grounded suitability as a distinct objective for aesthetic modeling.
By Xuanwei Hu, Haoyu Dong, Kejun Wu, Tianyi Liu, Jianjun Gao
Prior work on aesthetic composition typically produces a single aesthetically pleasing crop, overlooking the narrative value of composing multiple shots from one scene. In practice, multi-shot composition is critical for downstream creative workflows: commercial posters often require multiple crops with different emphases (e.
arXiv:2608. 01301v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Infrared-visible image fusion (IVIF) has no ideal fused reference, so fusion algorithms are routinely ranked by scalar objective metrics that formalize different proxies for information transfer, structure, or source similarity.
By Haoran Liu, Mingzhe Liu, Peng Li, Guibin Zan
arXiv:2512. 05098v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, Image Quality Assessment (IQA) for AI-generated images (AIGI) has advanced rapidly; however, existing methods primarily target portraits and artistic images, lacking a systematic evaluation of interior scenes.
By Yuan Gao, Jin Song, Yiyun Fei, Gongzhe Li, Ruigao Yang
arXiv:2611.02897v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Traditional image cropping assumes the photograph already contains the composition worth keeping, and asks only where to crop. A full 360$^{\circ}$...
By Yuan-Kang Lee, Kuan-Lin Chen, Chia-Che Chang, Yu-Lun Liu
Traditional Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) methods mainly rely on regressing absolute Mean Opinion Scores (MOS). However, such a paradigm overlooks the inherently dynamic nature of human aesthetic perception, which relies on subconscious comparison against implicit visual references.
arXiv:2610.34221v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Aesthetic image cropping (AIC) aims to improve image composition and aesthetic quality by removing extraneous or distracting content. Over the past dec...
By Xiangfei Sheng, Xiaofeng Pan, Leida Li, Qian Zhang, Biao Wang, Johan Wagemans, Weisi Lin
arXiv:2609.36628v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can generate rich video captions, yet often misidentify which person performs an action or which limb is involved, partic...
By Yanan Wang, Tingsong Li, Kaixun Jiang, Chongyang Zhong, Chenwei Xoe, Zhaohe Liao
arXiv:2610.17661v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The rapid development of mobile imaging and social platforms has led to explosive growth in user-generated content images, making their systematic...
By Shuhan Xia, Yu Chen, Xiang Wang, Shuai Li, Peipie Li, Zekun Li
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