ExpertVerse: A General-Purpose Benchmark for Expert-Level Reasoning in Knowledge-Intensive Visual Synthesis

Recent advances in multimodal generative models have enabled instruction-based image generation to move beyond semantic manipulation to knowledge-driven visual reasoning. However, these methods focus on explicit commonsense reasoning, shallow causal understanding, and direct knowledge recall, failing at knowledge-intensive generation. We develop ExpertVerse, a capability-centric benchmark to evaluate generative models via knowledge-intensive lens. ExpertVerse stratifies reasoning generation across an orthogonal taxonomy of textit9 cognitive capabilities and textit8 expert disciplines, yielding textit58 sub-disciplines. We curate 1,611 expert-annotated instances covering single-image editing, multi-image composition, and text-to-image generation. We further develop an automated workflow to produce ExpertVerse-100K, a large-scale dataset with reasoning traces and knowledge-anchored rationale annotations. Based on this, we train KnowThinker with RL fine-tuning, a VLM reasoning engine with world knowledge that jointly generates thinking processes and refined instructions. Towards the cross-modal credit misalignment and multi-objective gradient conflicts in multi-reward optimization, we propose a tailored Bootstrapped Pareto Policy Optimization (BPPO), which synergizes Bootstrapping Reward Rectification (BRR) and Conflict-Aware Pareto Advantage Fusion (CPAF). Extensive results of both open-source and proprietary models exposes critical reasoning deficits, highlighting imperative for knowledge-intensive benchmarks towards next-generation visual generation.