# Unpaired Image Enhancement Featuring Reinforcement-Learning-Controlled Image Editing Software

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.07833 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07833/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06705/) (2023)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement via Structure Modeling and Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05839/) (2023)
- [PPR10K: A Large-Scale Portrait Photo Retouching Dataset with Human-Region Mask and Group-Level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09180/) (2021)
- [JarvisArt: Liberating Human Artistic Creativity via an Intelligent Photo Retouching Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17612/) (2025)
- [4D LUT: Learnable Context-Aware 4D Lookup Table for Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01749/) (2022)
- [AdaptiveISP: Learning an Adaptive Image Signal Processor for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22939/) (2024)
- [LLDiffusion: Learning Degradation Representations in Diffusion Models for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14659/) (2023)
- [Very Lightweight Photo Retouching Network with Conditional Sequential Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06279/) (2021)
- [DiffRetouch: Using Diffusion to Retouch on the Shoulder of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03757/) (2024)
- [Lookup Table meets Local Laplacian Filter: Pyramid Reconstruction Network for Tone Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17190/) (2023)
- [MonetGPT: Solving Puzzles Enhances MLLMs' Image Retouching Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06176/) (2025)
- [PhotoArtAgent: Intelligent Photo Retouching with Language Model-Based Artist Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23130/) (2025)
- [Learning Diverse Tone Styles for Image Retouching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05430/) (2022)
- [Personalized Image Enhancement Featuring Masked Style Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09334/) (2023)
- [Goal Conditioned Reinforcement Learning for Photo Finishing Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07300/) (2025)
- [GM-MoE: Low-Light Enhancement with Gated-Mechanism Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07417/) (2025)
- [High-resolution Photo Enhancement in Real-time: A Laplacian Pyramid Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11613/) (2025)
- [RetouchIQ: MLLM Agents for Instruction-Based Image Retouching with Generalist Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17558/) (2026)
- [Prompt-Guided Image-Adaptive Neural Implicit Lookup Tables for Interpretable Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11055/) (2024)
- [FLOL: Fast Baselines for Real-World Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09718/) (2025)
- [Crowd-Powered Photo Enhancement Featuring an Active Learning Based Local Filter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09321/) (2023)
- [DPEC: Dual-Path Error Compensation Method for Enhanced Low-Light Image Clarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09553/) (2024)
- [RL-AWB: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Auto White Balance Correction in Low-Light Night-time Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05249/) (2026)
- [LuminanceL1Loss: A loss function which measures percieved brightness and colour differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04614/) (2023)
- [Learning Physics-Informed Color-Aware Transforms for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11896/) (2025)
- [DeepSPG: Exploring Deep Semantic Prior Guidance for Low-light Image Enhancement with Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19127/) (2025)
- [Local Low-light Image Enhancement via Region-Aware Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07711/) (2022)
- [Revealing Shadows: Low-Light Image Enhancement Using Self-Calibrated Illumination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15199/) (2023)
- [RSEND: Retinex-based Squeeze and Excitation Network with Dark Region Detection for Efficient Low Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09656/) (2024)
- [LLDif: Diffusion Models for Low-light Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04235/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper tackles unpaired image enhancement, a task of learning a mapping function which transforms input images into enhanced images in the absence of input-output image pairs. Our method is based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), but instead of simply generating images with a neural network, we enhance images utilizing image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop for the following three benefits: enhanced images have no artifacts, the same enhancement can be applied to larger images, and the enhancement is interpretable. To incorporate image editing software into a GAN, we propose a reinforcement learning framework where the generator works as the agent that selects the software's parameters and is rewarded when it fools the discriminator. Our framework can use high-quality non-differentiable filters present in image editing software, which enables image enhancement with high performance. We apply the proposed method to two unpaired image enhancement tasks: photo enhancement and face beautification. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance, compared to the performances of the state-of-the-art methods based on unpaired learning.