RL for Image Editing

RL: Reinforcement Learning

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3 papers in the last four weeks, with none the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Oct 5, 2026cs.CV

Scalable Minimal-Change Learning for Controllable Image Editing

Image editing should change only the attributes specified by an instruction while preserving everything else, yet current methods often make unintended changes. We treat this minimal-change principle as an optimization objective for instruction-based editing. Latent L1 regularization is a poor proxy for output locality in modern nonlinear generators and often requires supervision unavailable at scale. We instead optimize edit outcomes with reinforcement learning. An agentic vision-language reward model audits each source image, instruction, and edited image for two failure types: unimplemented requested changes and unintended changes. A group-level rubric merges and verifies these issues to provide consistent rewards across candidate edits without per-instruction human annotations. On FLUX.1 Kontext-dev, ARRO raises average EditScore from 5.21 to 5.88 across MinEval, MagicBrush, AnyBench, and Emu-Edit. On 600 evaluation examples, it reduces off-target pixel change by 8.4% relative to the base editor. Reward and SFT controls, blinded human evaluations, and transfer to OmniGen2 provide complementary evidence. Code: https://github.com/Showwwwwwwww/ARRO

Shuo Chen, Fengming Huang, Yu Yao +2

Sydney AI Centre, The University of Sydney

Text-Guided Image Editing Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Sep 29, 2026cs.CV

CrossTimeEdit: A Decade-Spanning Cross-View Dataset and Reward-Guided Editing for Historical Street-View Generation

Historical street-view imagery records urban evolution, but uneven coverage leaves substantial gaps in historical records. Generating plausible past appearances requires restoring changed structures while preserving persistent scene content. We construct VIGOR-his, a decade-spanning cross-view dataset containing 43,653 location-level quadruplets across 11 cities on three continents. Its automated pipeline performs spatial pairing, consistency screening, change classification, and the generation and validation of satellite-based change descriptions and local editing instructions. Based on VIGOR-his, we propose CrossTimeEdit, a model that reformulates historical street-view generation as editing, using recent street views to constrain viewpoint and unchanged appearance and temporal satellite differences as change evidence. Starting from FLUX.2 [Klein] 4B, we train CrossTimeEdit through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by online reinforcement learning (RL). We design three street-view editing criteria, namely Instruction Alignment (IA), Background Preservation (BP), and Quality and Physical Plausibility (QP), as both RL reward dimensions and evaluation metrics. We optimize this multi-reward objective using Within Group Relative Policy Optimization for flow-matching models (Flow-GRPO) with Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (GDPO), which normalizes each reward dimension before aggregation. CrossTimeEdit improves overall performance across the three editing criteria by 17.12% over the pretrained baseline and outperforms cross-view generation models in scene consistency, visual realism, and perceptual quality. The implementation code, dataset, and model weights are available at https://luhanwen67.github.io/CrossTimeEdit-release/.

Hanwen Lu, Jun He, Mingjia Yang +4

Sun Yat-sen University

Conditional Image Generation Diffusion-Based Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

Learning Native Reflection in Unified Models with Interleaved Reinforcement Learning

Unified multimodal models can both look at and render images, so in principle they can repair their own generations: diagnose what an image gets wrong, revise it, observe the result, and diagnose again. Whether a revision helps is known only after it is rendered, so the reflection text and the image generation must be learned jointly, over the whole loop. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on reflection trajectories gives a cold start but does not find the high-success repair paths, and naive RL that optimizes only the renderer or only one head leaves most of the gain untapped. We introduce UMM-Reflection, which applies reinforcement learning (RL) to complete reflection trajectories inside one unified model: sibling trajectories share one initial image, so the group-relative advantage compares reflection strategies, and one trajectory-level advantage updates both the reflection tokens and the flow-based revisions, avoiding the combinatorial blow-up of per-round credit assignment. Unlike single-round editing or pipelines with an external critic, credit flows across rounds and to both roles of the same model, and no verifier is needed at inference. On BAGEL, UMM-Reflection improves GenEval by 12.05 points over SFT, and the gains transfer to WISE (+10.97), OneIG-Bench (+3.48), and T2I-CompBench++ (+4.63), none of which is used in training.

Yijia Fan, Ziqi Huang, Zhongang Cai +5

Nanyang Technological University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · The University of Tokyo

Unified Multimodal Models Image Generation RL for Image Generation RL for Image Editing

Sep 22, 2026cs.CV

KwaiMind Technical Report

Commercial image editing requires product identity preservation, accurate text rendering, and user appeal alongside general editing quality. We present KwaiMind, an image editing system combining general capabilities with e-commerce specialization. An agent-based data engine maintains approximately 1.8 million high-quality editing pairs. Built on a multimodal diffusion transformer, KwaiMind undergoes continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, followed by preference optimization and online reinforcement learning. A general-purpose vision-language judge and specialized rewards for click-through rate (CTR), text rendering, and product consistency guide specialized policies, which are consolidated through on-policy distillation. We introduce Ecom-Bench, covering 11 commercial editing tasks with task-specific visual evaluation and CTR-based ranking. KwaiMind achieves the strongest overall scores among evaluated open-source editors on ImgEdit, GEdit, both language splits of REDEdit, and Ecom-Bench visual quality, and the highest aggregate CTR ranking score among compared systems. Offline, CTR-guided optimization increases the proportion of generated images whose predicted CTR exceeds that of the original product image from 12.16% to 37.41%. In an online A/B experiment, CTR-based selection of product main images yields an approximately 2.44% relative increase in actual CTR. These results demonstrate the value of domain-specific data and reward-driven alignment for commercial image editing.

Boheng Zhang, Fan Yang, Jia Sun +14

KwaiMind Team, Kuaishou Group

Image Editing Evaluation Diffusion-Based Image Editing Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

Element-Aware Group Learning for E-Commerce Image Generation

Recent advances in image generation and editing have made prompt quality a key bottleneck for e-commerce creatives. Vision-language models (VLMs) can generate image-editing prompts from product images and metadata, but further improving their prompt-writing capabilities requires post-training with feedback from the generated images. Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a natural framework for such outcome-level reward optimization. However, it assigns credit only at the full-prompt level, even though image quality often depends on specific design elements such as composition, background, and the presentation of selling points. Existing fine-grained credit assignment methods typically require step-level supervision or learned critics. To address this, we propose EAGLE-GRPO (Element-Aware Group Learning for E-Commerce Image Generation), which decomposes the group-centered reward over predefined elements. We cast element-level credit assignment as a kernel ridge regression problem and derive a closed-form solution, without additional rollouts or separate credit-assignment models. This yields interpretable per-element advantages and more precise policy updates. Experiments show that EAGLE-GRPO sustains performance gains over more training steps before plateauing and generates prompts that produce higher-quality e-commerce images than competitive VLM prompt-writing baselines.

Jingtong Chen, Jiahui Wang, Xue Zhao +2

Group Relative Policy Optimization Image Generation RL for Image Editing RL for VLMs Fine-Grained Credit Assignment

Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

Evaluation-Verification Reward for Consistent Multi-Reference Image Editing

While recent image editing models have made rapid progress, multi-reference editing remains challenging, particularly in maintaining visual consistency across references and ensuring overall visual harmony. Reinforcement learning has proven highly effective for text-to-image generation and single-image editing, but its extension to multi-reference editing is hindered by the absence of suitable reward models that capture multi-image relational constraints. Moreover, naively using multimodal large language models(MLLMs) as zero-shot evaluators faces a key tension between hallucination-prone long-form reasoning and the limited deductive power of short-form judgments. We address these issues with a Multi-dimensional Evaluation-Verification Reward(EVR). EVR decomposes evaluation into distinct visual criteria; for each criterion, an MLLM Evaluator generates multiple candidate hypotheses, and a Verifier grounds each claim in concrete visual evidence to accept or reject it, producing reliable and fine-grained reward signals. Together with a scalable data pipeline, our method enables RL fine-tuning of off-the-shelf editors without architectural changes. Extensive experiments show substantial gains over the base Qwen-Image-Edit, improving consistency and harmony to match or surpass NanoBanana.

Yingmao Miao, Pengfei Zhang, Xiaochen Lv +5

Xi’an Jiaotong University · DreamX Team, Alibaba Group · Shanghai Jiaotong University

Image Editing Evaluation Multimodal Reward Modeling Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Jun 25, 2026cs.CV

Qwen-Image-2.0-RL Technical Report

We present Qwen-Image-2.0-RL, a post-training pipeline that applies reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and on-policy distillation (OPD) to improve both the visual quality and instruction-following capability of the Qwen-Image-2.0 diffusion model. To provide reliable reward signals, we construct task-specific composite reward models by fine-tuning vision-language models with a pointwise scoring paradigm and chain-of-thought reasoning. For text-to-image generation, the reward models cover alignment, aesthetics, and portrait fidelity dimensions. For image editing tasks, the reward system addresses instruction-following accuracy and face identity preservation. Building on this reward system, we develop a scalable GRPO-based RL training framework, incorporating a hybrid classifier-free guidance (CFG) strategy to preserve pre-trained knowledge, prompt curation via intra-group reward range filtering, and per-category reward weight calibration. To merge the task-specialized RL policies for T2I and editing, we propose on-policy distillation as the final training stage, which consolidates multiple teachers into a single student model through trajectory-level velocity matching. Extensive evaluation shows that Qwen-Image-2.0-RL achieves 57.84 overall score on Qwen-Image-Bench (+2.61 over the base model), Elo ratings of 1193 in text-to-image arena (+78) and 1349 in image edit arena (+93), demonstrating consistent gains in aesthetic quality, prompt adherence, and editing accuracy.

Yixian Xu, Kaiyuan Gao, Yuxiang Chen +25

Equal contribution. · Corresponding author.

Reward Modeling RL for Diffusion Models Diffusion-Based Image Editing T2I Diffusion Models RL for Image Editing RL from Human Feedback

Jun 25, 2026cs.CV

SpatialFlow-GRPO: Where Spatial Credit Drives Image Editing

Recent online reinforcement learning has substantially improved image editing quality. However, existing Flow-GRPO-style methods usually rely on a single whole-image reward, which makes fine-grained editing optimization difficult. We observe that a key obstacle in image editing is this spatial uniformity assumption: a whole-image reward cannot distinguish how different spatial regions contribute to image quality. To address this issue, we propose SpatialFlow-GRPO, a training framework that introduces spatially fine-grained reward feedback. The framework converts region-aware rewards into semantic-region-level optimization signals and aligns region advantages with the corresponding latent positions during policy updates. We also train a region-aware reward model, SFReward, construct SFReward-14K with region-annotated editing samples, and introduce MultiEditBench to evaluate multi-region editing ability. On OmniGen2 and FLUX.2-klein-4B, SpatialFlow-GRPO outperforms Flow-GRPO on GEdit-Bench, ImgEdit-Bench, and MultiEditBench. The results show that SpatialFlow-GRPO converts local feedback into spatially aligned update signals and improves editing quality.

Yankai Yang, Yancheng Long, Wei Chen +7

Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · Kuaishou Technology

Reward Modeling Group Relative Policy Optimization RL for Image Generation RL for Diffusion Models Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Jun 17, 2026cs.CV

ProductConsistency: Improving Product Identity Preservation in Instruction-Based Image Editing via SFT and RL

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

Mukund Khanna, Raj Singh Yadav, Kunal Singh

Fractal Analytics

Image Editing Evaluation Text-Guided Image Editing Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Jun 6, 2026cs.CV

IEA: Amateur-Friendly Conversational Image Editing Agent via Three Stages of Multitask Alignment

Current image editing software often hinges on fixed filters or expert tuning, leaving a gap between amateur users' intent and outcomes. Creations by generative models may contain artifacts, implausible details, or stylistic drift away from photorealism and offer little insight into why an edit was made. We propose IEA, a conversational Image Editing Agent that learns to operate parameterized tools in an explicit, interpretable action space. IEA is trained via a three-stage multitask pipeline: (1) SFT on distilled expert edits, (2) GRPO with rewards for likeness improvement, tool usefulness, and intent summarization, and (3) large-scale synthetic fine-tuning to jointly master image editing, refinement, and user intent summarization. By manipulating 16 editing tools step by step, IEA produces transparent edit traces that can be inspected and debugged. In quantitative experiments, it attains a lower pixel distance on the edit task and a higher ROUGE-L on the summary task than strong baselines. In user studies, it ranks best among tool-calling methods for instruction following while surpassing generative methods in overall perceptual quality. Our results validate interpretable, tool-centric VLMs as a reliable path to human instruction-guided image retouching.

Zichen Zhu, Yuheng Sun, Mingxuan Zhu +11

X-LANCE Lab, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Huawei Technologies Ltd. · Shanghai Innovation Institution +1

Text-Guided Image Editing Tool-Using Vision-Language Agents Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Jun 4, 2026cs.AI

Edit-R2: Context-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Image Editing

Text-guided image editing has advanced rapidly with diffusion models and unified multimodal foundation models. However, most existing methods remain confined to single-turn settings, overlooking the more realistic scenario of multi-turn in-context editing, where users iteratively refine an image through a sequence of instructions. In this setting, a model must follow each new instruction while preserving accumulated session-level constraints, challenged by two coupled failure modes: long-context dilution, where sparse textual constraints become difficult to recover from growing interleaved image-text histories, and state contamination, where earlier editing mistakes degrade subsequent generations. We introduce Edit-R2, a novel reinforcement learning post-training framework for unified multimodal models. Edit-R2 reconstructs the operative session intent, which effectively consolidates scattered historical constraints into an explicit reasoning trace before each editing turn. It further enables multi-turn RL over both reasoning and generation through a unified objective that jointly optimizes intent reconstruction generation in discrete text space and flow-matching image generation in continuous latent space, while a trajectory filtering mechanism suppresses corrupted rollouts to stabilize training under state contamination. To support systematic evaluation, we introduce MICE-Bench, a large-scale benchmark for multi-turn in-context editing with automated metrics for instruction following (IF), content consistency (CC), and global awareness (GA) over accumulated session constraints. Experiments show that Edit-R2 substantially improves multi-turn in-context editing and achieves competitive performance compared against strong baselines.

Yuxiao Ye, Haoran He, Fangyuan Kong +4

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Kuaishou Technology

Reinforcement Learning Image Editing Evaluation Unified Multimodal Models Diffusion-Based Image Editing Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

MT-EditFlow: Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Image Editing with Flow Matching

Recent breakthroughs in instruction-based image editing have captured significant attention, as models are now capable of handling real-world editing demands with the practicality required by everyday users. However, editing models trained primarily for single-turn edits often break down in multi-turn editing--the natural interactive setting where a user iteratively refines an image based on the model's own previous outputs. This failure stems from the all-or-nothing requirement, where a single failed turn compromises the entire sequence, and error propagation, where exposure bias leads to compounding editing errors. To address these challenges, we introduce MT-EditFlow, a flow-matching reinforcement learning framework designed to optimize reward signals for sequential image editing. MT-EditFlow integrates a multi-turn perspective with a multi-reward formulation to provide a unified structure applicable to both GRPO and NFT-based reinforcement learning methods. We systematically analyze and optimize the reward signal by investigating effective scoring strategies for turn-level aggregation, VLM reasoning modes to trade off reward bias and variance, and advantage fusion levels to prevent reward hacking. Our findings reveal that broadcasting the aggregated advantage across the entire editing trajectory effectively bridges the gap between local planning and global multi-turn task success. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MT-EditFlow significantly improves performance across diverse base models. Notably, it boosts FLUX.1-Kontext-dev by 6.85 points in turn-3 overall performance, surpassing state-of-the-art open-source models such as Qwen-Image-Edit. By maintaining high marginal success rates and reducing exposure bias, MT-EditFlow provides a foundation for more reliable and natural human-AI collaboration in visual content creation.

Jiahui Huang, Yasi Zhang, Tianyu Chen +6

Apple · University of California, Los Angeles · University of Texas at Austin +1

Multimodal Reward Modeling RL for Generative Models Diffusion-Based Image Editing Image Editing RL for Image Editing

May 16, 2026cs.CV

Edit-GRPO: A Locality-Preserving Policy Optimization Framework for Image Editing

A fundamental challenge in image editing lies in preserving spatial locality: edits should improve targeted content without inadvertently altering surrounding regions. However, most optimization-based editing approaches treat images as holistic entities, causing global policy updates that undermine locality and introduce undesired context changes. We observe that this issue stems from a mismatch between localized editing intent and globally applied optimization signals. Motivated by this insight, we propose Edit-GRPO, preserving Locality while optimizing image editing, a locality-preserving policy optimization framework that explicitly decouples editing and preservation objectives. By assigning region-specific optimization signals to edit and non-edit areas, Edit-GRPO aligns policy updates with the spatial structure of editing tasks, enabling localized improvements while maintaining global visual coherence. This design effectively suppresses common artifacts such as context distortion and boundary inconsistency. Extensive experiments across diverse image editing scenarios demonstrate that Edit-GRPO significantly improves locality preservation while maintaining strong editing performance compared to existing optimization-based methods, validating the generality and effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Shaodong Xu, Zexian Li, Zhendong Wang +5

Alibaba Group

Group Relative Policy Optimization Policy Optimization Image Editing RL for Image Editing

May 14, 2026cs.CV

From Plans to Pixels: Learning to Plan and Orchestrate for Open-Ended Image Editing

Modern image editing models produce realistic results but struggle with abstract, multi step instructions (e.g., ``make this advertisement more vegetarian-friendly''). Prior agent based methods decompose such tasks but rely on handcrafted pipelines or teacher imitation, limiting flexibility and decoupling learning from actual editing outcomes. We propose an experiential framework for long-horizon image editing, where a planner generates structured atomic decompositions and an orchestrator selects tools and regions to execute each step. A vision language judge provides outcome-based rewards for instruction adherence and visual quality. The orchestrator is trained to maximize these rewards, and successful trajectories are used to refine the planner. By tightly coupling planning with reward driven execution, our approach yields more coherent and reliable edits than single-step or rule-based multistep baselines.

Anirudh Sundara Rajan, Krishna Kumar Singh, Yong Jae Lee

University of Wisconsin–Madison, WI, USA · Adobe Research, San Jose, CA, USA

Text-Guided Image Editing Tool-Using Vision-Language Agents Image Editing RL for Image Editing

May 8, 2026cs.CV

From Synthetic to Real: Toward Identity-Consistent Makeup Transfer with Synthetic and Real Data

Makeup transfer aims to apply the makeup style of a reference portrait to a source portrait while preserving identity and background. Early methods formulate this task as unsupervised image-to-image translation, relying on surrogate objectives and often yielding limited performance. Recent diffusion- and flow-based approaches instead exploit synthetic data for supervised training, leading to significant improvements. However, these methods still face two critical challenges: synthetic supervision frequently fails to faithfully preserve identity, and the domain gap between synthetic and real data limits generalization, resulting in degraded performance in complex real-world scenarios. To address these issues, this paper first proposes ConsistentBeauty, a novel data curation pipeline that ensures makeup fidelity and strict identity consistency within the synthesized data. Second, we propose RealBeauty, a synthetic-to-real post-training framework. Beyond supervised learning on curated synthetic data, we further adapt the model to real-world scenarios through reinforcement learning and design novel verifiable rewards tailored to the makeup transfer task. It allows the model to further benefit from real makeup patterns beyond synthetic supervision. In addition, we establish a new diverse benchmark for makeup transfer, covering a wide range of skin tones, ages, genders, poses, and makeup styles, thereby enabling a more comprehensive evaluation of model performance under diverse real-world conditions. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks and demonstrates clear advantages in identity preservation and performance on complex real-world cases.

Yue Yu, Jiayu Wang, Jiajia Shi +2

College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China · Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China

Synthetic-to-Real Domain Adaptation Image-to-Image Translation Synthetic Data Generation Image Style Transfer RL for Image Editing

Apr 30, 2026cs.CV

Leveraging Verifier-Based Reinforcement Learning in Image Editing

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a pivotal paradigm for text-to-image generation, its application to image editing remains largely unexplored. A key bottleneck is the lack of a robust general reward model for all editing tasks. Existing edit reward models usually give overall scores without detailed checks, ignoring different instruction requirements and causing biased rewards. To address this, we argue that the key is to move from a simple scorer to a reasoning verifier. We introduce Edit-R1, a framework that builds a chain-of-thought (CoT) verifier-based reasoning reward model (RRM) and then leverages it for downstream image editing. The Edit-RRM breaks instructions into distinct principles, evaluates the edited image against each principle, and aggregates these checks into an interpretable, fine-grained reward. To build such an RRM, we first apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a ``cold-start'' to generate CoT reward trajectories. Then, we introduce Group Contrastive Preference Optimization (GCPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm that leverages human pairwise preference data to reinforce our pointwise RRM. After building the RRM, we use GRPO to train editing models with this non-differentiable yet powerful reward model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Edit-RRM surpasses powerful VLMs such as Seed-1.5-VL and Seed-1.6-VL as an editing-specific reward model, and we observe a clear scaling trend, with performance consistently improving from 3B to 7B parameters. Moreover, Edit-R1 delivers gains to editing models like FLUX.1-kontext, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing image editing.

Hanzhong Guo, Jie Wu, Jie Liu +6

School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong · ByteDance Seed · CUHK +1

Reward Modeling Reinforcement Learning RL for Diffusion Models RL for Image Editing

Apr 28, 2026cs.CV

DDA-Thinker: Decoupled Dual-Atomic Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Driven Image Editing

Recent image editing models have achieved strong visual fidelity but often struggle with tasks requiring complex reasoning. To investigate and enhance the reasoning-grounded planning for image editing, we propose DDA-Thinker, a Thinker-centric framework designed for the independent optimization of a planning module (Thinker) over a fixed generative model (Editor). This decoupled Thinker-centric paradigm facilitates a controlled analysis of the planning module and makes its contribution under a fixed Editor easier to assess. To effectively guide this Thinker, we introduce a dual-atomic reinforcement learning framework. This framework decomposes feedback into two distinct atomic rewards implemented through verifiable checklists: a cognitive-atomic reward to directly assess the quality of the Thinker's executable plan, which serves as the actionable outcome of the Thinker's reasoning, and a visual-atomic reward to assess the final image quality. To improve checklist quality, our checklist synthesis is grounded not only in the source image and user instruction but also in a rational reference description of the ideal post-edit scene. To support this training, we further develop a two-stage data curation pipeline that first synthesizes a diverse and reasoning-focused dataset, then applies difficulty-aware refinement to curate an effective training curriculum for reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments on reasoning-driven image editing benchmarks, including RISE-Bench and KRIS-Bench, demonstrate that our approach substantially improves overall performance. Our method enables a community model to achieve results competitive with strong proprietary models, highlighting the practical potential of Thinker-centric optimization under a fixed-editor setting.

Hanqing Yang, Qiang Zhou, Yongchao Du +6

Alibaba Group · Zhejiang University

Reinforcement Learning Text-Guided Image Editing RL for Generative Models Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

HP-Edit: A Human-Preference Post-Training Framework for Image Editing

Common image editing tasks typically adopt powerful generative diffusion models as the leading paradigm for real-world content editing. Meanwhile, although reinforcement learning (RL) methods such as Diffusion-DPO and Flow-GRPO have further improved generation quality, efficiently applying Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to diffusion-based editing remains largely unexplored, due to a lack of scalable human-preference datasets and frameworks tailored to diverse editing needs. To fill this gap, we propose HP-Edit, a post-training framework for Human Preference-aligned Editing, and introduce RealPref-50K, a real-world dataset across eight common tasks and balancing common object editing. Specifically, HP-Edit leverages a small amount of human-preference scoring data and a pretrained visual large language model (VLM) to develop HP-Scorer--an automatic, human preference-aligned evaluator. We then use HP-Scorer both to efficiently build a scalable preference dataset and to serve as the reward function for post-training the editing model. We also introduce RealPref-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating real-world editing performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances models such as Qwen-Image-Edit-2509, aligning their outputs more closely with human preference.

Fan Li, Chonghuinan Wang, Lina Lei +9

Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab · Nankai University · Harbin Institute of Technology

Diffusion Model Alignment Image Editing Evaluation RL for Diffusion Models Diffusion-Based Image Editing Image Editing RL for Image Editing+1

Apr 10, 2026cs.CV

Region-Constrained Group Relative Policy Optimization for Flow-Based Image Editing

Instruction-guided image editing requires balancing target modification with non-target preservation. Recently, flow-based models have emerged as a strong and increasingly adopted backbone for instruction-guided image editing, thanks to their high fidelity and efficient deterministic ODE sampling. Building on this foundation, GRPO-based reward-driven post-training has been explored to directly optimize editing-specific rewards, improving instruction following and editing consistency. However, existing methods often suffer from noisy credit assignment: global exploration also perturbs non-target regions, inflating within-group reward variance and yielding noisy GRPO advantages. To address this, we propose RC-GRPO-Editing, a region-constrained GRPO post-training framework for flow-based image editing under deterministic ODE sampling. It suppresses background-induced nuisance variance to enable cleaner localized credit assignment, improving editing region instruction adherence while preserving non-target content. Concretely, we localize exploration via region-decoupled initial noise perturbations to reduce background-induced reward variance and stabilize GRPO advantages, and introduce an attention concentration reward that aligns cross-attention with the intended editing region throughout the rollout, reducing unintended changes in non-target regions. Experiments on CompBench show consistent improvements in editing region instruction adherence and non-target preservation.

Zhuohan Ouyang, Zhe Qian, Wenhuo Cui +1

1South China Normal University · 2South China Agricultural University · 3Monash University

Text-Guided Image Editing Group Relative Policy Optimization RL for Image Generation Image Editing RL for Image Editing

Mar 3, 2026cs.CV

Edit in 2D, Verify in 3D: Reinforcement Learning for Multi-view Consistent Scene Editing

Leveraging the priors of 2D diffusion models for 3D editing has emerged as a promising paradigm. However, multi-view consistency remains challenging in edited results, and the extreme scarcity of paired 3D-consistent editing data makes supervised fine-tuning (SFT) impractical, despite its effectiveness for editing tasks. In this paper, we observe that, while generating multi-view consistent 3D content is highly challenging, verifying 3D consistency is tractable, naturally positioning reinforcement learning (RL) as a feasible solution. Motivated by this, we propose RL3DEdit, a single-pass framework driven by RL optimization with novel rewards derived from the 3D foundation model, VGGT. Specifically, we leverage VGGT's robust priors learned from massive real-world data, feed the edited images into it, and utilize the output confidence maps and pose estimation errors as reward signals, effectively anchoring the 2D editing priors onto a 3D-consistent manifold via RL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RL3DEdit achieves stable multi-view consistency and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in editing quality with high efficiency. To promote the development of 3D editing, we will release the code and model.

Jiyuan Wang, Chunyu Lin, Lei Sun +8

1BJTU, 2AMap Alibaba Group, 3NTU, 4CQUPT

Multi-View Consistency Reinforcement Learning 3D Scene Editing Diffusion-Based Image Editing RL for Image Editing