# Bridging Human Evaluation to Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03871 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03871/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [DPOK: Reinforcement Learning for Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16381/) (2023)
- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [Follow Your Pose: Pose-Guided Text-to-Video Generation using Pose-Free Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01186/) (2023)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [CDDFuse: Correlation-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14461/) (2022)
- [DDFM: Denoising Diffusion Model for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06840/) (2023)
- [Rich Human Feedback for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10240/) (2023)
- [Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02097/) (2023)
- [Equivariant Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11443/) (2023)
- [LRRNet: A Novel Representation Learning Guided Fusion Network for Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05172/) (2023)
- [InstructVideo: Instructing Video Diffusion Models with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12490/) (2023)
- [Text-IF: Leveraging Semantic Text Guidance for Degradation-Aware and Interactive Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16387/) (2024)
- [CoCoNet: Coupled Contrastive Learning Network with Multi-level Feature Ensemble for Multi-modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10960/) (2022)
- [A Task-guided, Implicitly-searched and Meta-initialized Deep Model for Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15862/) (2023)
- [DCEvo: Discriminative Cross-Dimensional Evolutionary Learning for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17673/) (2025)
- [Learning a Graph Neural Network with Cross Modality Interaction for Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03256/) (2023)
- [VIFB: A Visible and Infrared Image Fusion Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03322/) (2020)
- [DifIISR: A Diffusion Model with Gradient Guidance for Infrared Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01187/) (2025)
- [From Text to Pixels: A Context-Aware Semantic Synergy Solution for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00421/) (2023)
- [Towards Reliable Advertising Image Generation Using Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00418/) (2024)
- [MaeFuse: Transferring Omni Features with Pretrained Masked Autoencoders for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Guided Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11016/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Uncertainty-aware Spatial-Frequency Registration and Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13049/) (2026)
- [From 2D Grids to 1D Tokens: Reforming Shared Representations for Multimodal Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12303/) (2026)
- [Bringing Multimodal Large Language Models to Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06969/) (2026)
- [DRFusion: Drift-Resilient Temporally Consistent Infrared-Visible Video Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25775/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) integrates complementary modalities to enhance scene perception. Current methods predominantly focus on optimizing handcrafted losses and objective metrics, often resulting in fusion outcomes that do not align with human visual preferences. This challenge is further exacerbated by the ill-posed nature of IVIF, which severely limits its effectiveness in human perceptual environments such as security surveillance and driver assistance systems. To address these limitations, we propose a feedback reinforcement framework that bridges human evaluation to infrared and visible image fusion. To address the lack of human-centric evaluation metrics and data, we introduce the first large-scale human feedback dataset for IVIF, containing multidimensional subjective scores and artifact annotations, and enriched by a fine-tuned large language model with expert review. Based on this dataset, we design a domain-specific reward function and train a reward model to quantify perceptual quality. Guided by this reward, we fine-tune the fusion network through Group Relative Policy Optimization, achieving state-of-the-art performance that better aligns fused images with human aesthetics. Code is available at https://github.com/ALKA-Wind/EVAFusion.