mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Unified Personalized Reward Model for Vision Generation

arXiv 2602.02380 ↗First posted 2 Feb 2026cs.CVcited by 11

On the map: LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation → Diffusion and multimodal model alignment

Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in multimodal reward models (RMs) have significantly propelled the development of visual generation. Existing frameworks typically adopt Bradley-Terry-style preference modeling or leverage generative VLMs as judges, and subsequently optimize visual generation models via reinforcement learning. However, current RMs suffer from inherent limitations: they often follow a one-size-fits-all paradigm that assumes a monolithic preference distribution or relies on fixed evaluation rubrics. As a result, they are insensitive to content-specific visual cues, leading to systematic misalignment with subjective and context-dependent human preferences. To this end, inspired by human assessment, we propose UnifiedReward-Flex, a unified personalized reward model for vision generation that couples reward modeling with flexible and context-adaptive reasoning. Specifically, given a prompt and the generated visual content, it first interprets the semantic intent and grounds on visual evidence, then dynamically constructs a hierarchical assessment by instantiating fine-grained criteria under both predefined and self-generated high-level dimensions. Our training pipeline follows a two-stage process: (1) we first distill structured, high-quality reasoning traces from advanced closed-source VLMs to bootstrap SFT, equipping the model with flexible and context-adaptive reasoning behaviors; (2) we then perform direct preference optimization (DPO) on carefully curated preference pairs to further strengthen reasoning fidelity and discriminative alignment. To validate the effectiveness, we integrate UnifiedReward-Flex into the GRPO framework for image and video synthesis, and extensive results demonstrate its superiority.

Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and multimodal model alignment, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation. Builds on 38 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

Builds on

38 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 19

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026DenseGRPO: From Sparse to Dense Reward for Flow Matching Model Alignment28 Jan
  2. 2025Multimodal RewardBench 2: Evaluating Omni Reward Models for Interleaved Text and Image18 Dec
  3. 2025VR-Thinker: Boosting Video Reward Models through Thinking-with-Image Reasoning12 Oct
  4. 2025RewardDance: Reward Scaling in Visual Generation10 Sep
  5. 2025Pref-GRPO: Pairwise Preference Reward-based GRPO for Stable Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learning28 Aug
  6. 2025HPSv3: Towards Wide-Spectrum Human Preference Score5 Aug
  7. 2025MixGRPO: Unlocking Flow-based GRPO Efficiency with Mixed ODE-SDE29 Jul
  8. 2025DanceGRPO: Unleashing GRPO on Visual Generation12 May
  9. 2025Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reward Model through Reinforcement Fine-Tuning6 May
  10. 2025Unified Reward Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generation7 Mar
  11. 2025Improving Video Generation with Human Feedback23 Jan
  12. 2025InternLM-XComposer2.5-Reward: A Simple Yet Effective Multi-Modal Reward Model21 Jan
7 more
  1. 2024VideoDPO: Omni-Preference Alignment for Video Diffusion Generation18 Dec
  2. 2024LiFT: Leveraging Human Feedback for Text-to-Video Model Alignment6 Dec
  3. 2024Video Diffusion Alignment via Reward Gradients11 Jul
  4. 2023Using Human Feedback to Fine-tune Diffusion Models without Any Reward Model22 Nov
  5. 2023Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization21 Nov
  6. 2023Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewards29 Sep
  7. 2023Aligning Text-to-Image Models using Human Feedback23 Feb

Other references · 19

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  2. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  3. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
  4. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  5. 2024LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfercited by 2,669
  6. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,536
  7. 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,755
  8. 2023Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 950
  9. 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 946
  10. 2023Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learningcited by 939
  11. 2023Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 847
  12. 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RLcited by 605
7 more
  1. 2024LLaVA-Critic: Learning to Evaluate Multimodal Modelscited by 132
  2. 2024GenAI Arena: An Open Evaluation Platform for Generative Modelscited by 81
  3. 2025VideoScore2: Think before You Score in Generative Video Evaluationcited by 37
  4. 2025LLaVA-Critic-R1: Your Critic Model is Secretly a Strong Policy Modelcited by 34
  5. 2025UniGenBench++: A Unified Semantic Evaluation Benchmark for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 23
  6. 2025MJ-VIDEO: Fine-Grained Benchmarking and Rewarding Video Preferences in Video Generationcited by 14
  7. 2025Multi-Crit: Benchmarking Multimodal Judges on Pluralistic Criteria-Followingcited by 14

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.

11 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024VisionReward: Fine-Grained Multi-Dimensional Human Preference Learning for Image and Video Generation
  2. 2026Joint Reward Modeling: Internalizing Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Visual Reward Models
  3. 2025ARM-Thinker: Reinforcing Multimodal Generative Reward Models with Agentic Tool Use and Visual Reasoning
  4. 2026Think Before You Score: Thinking Reward Model for Visual Generation
  5. 2025SRUM: Fine-Grained Self-Rewarding for Unified Multimodal Models
  6. 2026RationalRewards: Reasoning Rewards Scale Visual Generation Both Training and Test Time
  7. 2025Listener-Rewarded Thinking in VLMs for Image Preferences
  8. 2025Revisiting the Learning Objectives of Vision-Language Reward Models