ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation
Jiazheng Xu, Xiao Liu, Yuchen Wu, Yuxuan Tong, Qinkai Li, Ming Ding, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
Abstract
We present a comprehensive solution to learn and improve text-to-image models from human preference feedback. To begin with, we build ImageReward -- the first general-purpose text-to-image human preference reward model -- to effectively encode human preferences. Its training is based on our systematic annotation pipeline including rating and ranking, which collects 137k expert comparisons to date. In human evaluation, ImageReward outperforms existing scoring models and metrics, making it a promising automatic metric for evaluating text-to-image synthesis. On top of it, we propose Reward Feedback Learning (ReFL), a direct tuning algorithm to optimize diffusion models against a scorer. Both automatic and human evaluation support ReFL's advantages over compared methods. All code and datasets are provided at https://github.com/THUDM/ImageReward.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Your agent calls
Luneget_paper_fulltext
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers fulltext 8bca80bd-4f6b-4dd4-a631-fd90a88aa21bCited by top-tier papers721
- Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image GenerationYuval Kirstain, Adam Polyak, Uriel Singer, Shahbuland Matiana et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 1,192 citations
- Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement LearningKevin Black, Michael Janner, Yilun Du, Ilya Kostrikov et al.ICLR 2024 · 816 citations
- Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image SynthesisTianwei Yin, Michaël Gharbi, Taesung Park, Richard Zhang et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 728 citations
- Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RLJie Liu, Gongye Liu, Jiajun Liang, Yangguang Li et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 647 citations
- Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable RewardsKevin Clark, Paul Vicol, Kevin Swersky, David J. FleetICLR 2024 · 377 citations
Builds on29
- Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersTom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 64,255 citations
- Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language SupervisionAlec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh et al.ICML 2021 · 47,906 citations
- Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic ModelsJonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, Pieter AbbeelNeurIPS 2020 · 35,902 citations
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
- Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image SynthesisPrafulla Dhariwal, Alexander Quinn NicholNeurIPS 2021 · 13,211 citations
Related papers
- DSPO: Direct Score Preference Optimization for Diffusion Model AlignmentHuaisheng Zhu, Teng Xiao, Vasant G. HonavarICLR 2025
- Aligning Diffusion Models by Optimizing Human UtilityShufan Li, Konstantinos Kallidromitis, Akash Gokul, Yusuke Kato et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 117 citations
- Curriculum Direct Preference Optimization for Diffusion and Consistency ModelsFlorinel-Alin Croitoru, Vlad Hondru, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Nicu Sebe et al.CVPR 2025
- PrefPaint: Aligning Image Inpainting Diffusion Model with Human PreferenceKendong Liu, Zhiyu Zhu, Chuanhao Li, Hui Liu et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 26 citations
- Style-GRPO: Semantic-Aware Preference Optimization for Image Style Transfer Guided by Reward ModelingJianbin Zhao, Chaoran Feng, Miao Yu, Yingtao Li et al.CVPR 2026
