AesFormer: Transform Everyday Photos into Beautiful Memories

With the recent fast development of generative models, instruction-based image editing has shown great potential in generating high-quality images. However, the quality of editing highly depends on carefully designed instructions, placing the burden of task decomposition and sequencing entirely on the user. To achieve autonomous image editing, we present PhotoAgent, a system that advances image editing through explicit aesthetic planning. Specifically, PhotoAgent formulates autonomous image editing as a long-horizon decision-making problem. It reasons over user aesthetic intent, plans multi-step editing actions via tree search, and iteratively refines results through closed-loop execution with memory and visual feedback, without requiring step-by-step user prompts. To support reliable evaluation in real-world scenarios, we introduce UGC-Edit, an aesthetic evaluation benchmark consisting of 7,000 photos and a learned aesthetic reward model. We also construct a test set containing 1,017 photos to systematically assess autonomous photo editing performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhotoAgent consistently improves both instruction adherence and visual quality compared with baseline methods. The project page is https://mdyao.github.io/PhotoAgent/.

Traditional photographic image editing typically requires users to possess sufficient aesthetic understanding to provide appropriate instructions for adjusting image quality and camera parameters. However, this paradigm relies on explicit human instruction of aesthetic intent, which is often ambiguous, incomplete, or inaccessible to non-expert users. In this work, we propose SmartPhotoCrafter, an automatic photographic image editing method which formulates image editing as a tightly coupled reasoning-to-generation process. The proposed model first performs image quality comprehension and identifies deficiencies by the Image Critic module, and then the Photographic Artist module realizes targeted edits to enhance image appeal, eliminating the need for explicit human instructions. A multi-stage training pipeline is adopted: (i) Foundation pretraining to establish basic aesthetic understanding and editing capabilities, (ii) Adaptation with reasoning-guided multi-edit supervision to incorporate rich semantic guidance, and (iii) Coordinated reasoning-to generation reinforcement learning to jointly optimize reasoning and generation. During training, SmartPhotoCrafter emphasizes photo-realistic image generation, while supporting both image restoration and retouching tasks with consistent adherence to color- and tone-related semantics. We also construct a stage-specific dataset, which progressively builds reasoning and controllable generation, effective cross-module collaboration, and ultimately high-quality photographic enhancement. Experiments demonstrate that SmartPhotoCrafter outperforms existing generative models on the task of automatic photographic enhancement, achieving photo-realistic results while exhibiting higher tonal sensitivity to retouching instructions. Project page: https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/SmartPhotoCrafter.

Professional photo finishing relies on both global adjustments and region-specific local edits guided by semantic masks, yet current automated methods handle this workflow only partially. We present PrismGPT, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) framework that produces structured, region-aware editing plans from a single input image without relying on commercial black-box tools. Training a VLM to simultaneously diagnose aesthetic deficiencies at both global and local levels while predicting precise editing parameters is challenging due to the vast combinatorial decision space. We address this through proxy-guided learning: two simpler proxy tasks -- operation decomposition and region-aware aesthetic ranking -- teach the foundational skills the model needs, while a competence-based dynamic scheduler automatically rebalances the multi-task training ratio, progressively shifting emphasis from the proxy tasks to the primary editing task as each skill is mastered. Crucially, all reasoning traces used for supervised fine-tuning are self-synthesized by the same base model, eliminating the need for a stronger external teacher. Experiments on MIT-Adobe FiveK and SPIRE, a new professionally retouched benchmark we introduce, show that PrismGPT achieves state-of-the-art results while using only ~6% of the training data compared to the previous best method.