mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Self-Rewarding Large Vision-Language Models for Optimizing Prompts in Text-to-Image Generation

arXiv 2505.16763 ↗First posted 22 May 2025cs.CVcited by 10

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → MLLM training and visual instruction tuning

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image models are powerful for producing high-quality images based on given text prompts, but crafting these prompts often requires specialized vocabulary. To address this, existing methods train rewriting models with supervision from large amounts of manually annotated data and trained aesthetic assessment models. To alleviate the dependence on data scale for model training and the biases introduced by trained models, we propose a novel prompt optimization framework, designed to rephrase a simple user prompt into a sophisticated prompt to a text-to-image model. Specifically, we employ the large vision language models (LVLMs) as the solver to rewrite the user prompt, and concurrently, employ LVLMs as a reward model to score the aesthetics and alignment of the images generated by the optimized prompt. Instead of laborious human feedback, we exploit the prior knowledge of the LVLM to provide rewards, i.e., AI feedback. Simultaneously, the solver and the reward model are unified into one model and iterated in reinforcement learning to achieve self-improvement by giving a solution and judging itself. Results on two popular datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other strong competitors.

Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 27 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

Builds on

27 of 39 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmark7 Feb
  2. 2023VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models12 Dec
  3. 2023The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)29 Sep
  4. 2023MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities4 Aug

Other references · 23

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  3. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  4. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
  5. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  6. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
  7. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,355
  8. 2021Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generationcited by 4,288
  9. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferencescited by 3,912
  10. 2021Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervisioncited by 3,864
  11. 2020Learning to summarize from human feedbackcited by 2,588
  12. 2023LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attentioncited by 781
11 more
  1. 2016Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesiscited by 735
  2. 2021CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformerscited by 694
  3. 2024Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Modelscited by 557
  4. 2022DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Modelscited by 379
  5. 2023JudgeLM: Fine-tuned Large Language Models are Scalable Judgescited by 367
  6. 2018Reward learning from human preferences and demonstrations in Ataricited by 316
  7. 2016Diverse Beam Search: Decoding Diverse Solutions from Neural Sequence Modelscited by 301
  8. 2019Way Off-Policy Batch Deep Reinforcement Learning of Implicit Human Preferences in Dialogcited by 284
  9. 2021Design Guidelines for Prompt Engineering Text-to-Image Generative Modelscited by 218
  10. 2023Some things are more CRINGE than others: Iterative Preference Optimization with the Pairwise Cringe Losscited by 108
  11. 2022Vision-Language Intelligence: Tasks, Representation Learning, and Large Modelscited by 28

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 4.

10 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2022Optimizing Prompts for Text-to-Image Generation
  2. 2025RePrompt: Reasoning-Augmented Reprompting for Text-to-Image Generation via Reinforcement Learning
  3. 2024Multimodal Large Language Model is a Human-Aligned Annotator for Text-to-Image Generation
  4. 2026PromptEcho: Annotation-Free Reward from Vision-Language Models for Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learning
  5. 2025PromptEnhancer: A Simple Approach to Enhance Text-to-Image Models via Chain-of-Thought Prompt Rewriting
  6. 2023BeautifulPrompt: Towards Automatic Prompt Engineering for Text-to-Image Synthesis
  7. 2026Read It Back: Pretrained MLLMs Are Zero-Shot Reward Models for Text-to-Image Generation
  8. 2024Batch-Instructed Gradient for Prompt Evolution:Systematic Prompt Optimization for Enhanced Text-to-Image Synthesis