# Learning Color Grading, No Photo Sharing: Federated Aesthetic Preference Learning for Personalized Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27659 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27659/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [Agnostic Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00146/) (2019)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [Deep Bilateral Learning for Real-Time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02880/) (2017)
- [Learning Image-adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for High Performance Photo Enhancement in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14468/) (2020)
- [FedVision: An Online Visual Object Detection Platform Powered by Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06202/) (2020)
- [Secure Federated Matrix Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05108/) (2019)
- [AdaInt: Learning Adaptive Intervals for 3D Lookup Tables on Real-time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13983/) (2022)
- [VILA: Learning Image Aesthetics from User Comments with Vision-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14302/) (2023)
- [Personalized Image Aesthetics Assessment with Rich Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16754/) (2022)
- [Aesthetic-Driven Image Enhancement by Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05251/) (2017)
- [FedCV: A Federated Learning Framework for Diverse Computer Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11066/) (2021)
- [Efficient-FedRec: Efficient Federated Learning Framework for Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05446/) (2021)
- [LAPIS: A novel dataset for personalized image aesthetic assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07670/) (2025)
- [Scaling Up Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment via Task Vector Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07176/) (2024)
- [Lightweight and Fast Real-time Image Enhancement via Decomposition of the Spatial-aware Lookup Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16121/) (2025)
- [AccelAes: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers for Training-Free Aesthetic-Enhanced Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12575/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PrefLUT: Reusable and Refinable Personalized Color Editing from Pairwise Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34133/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized image enhancement should reflect individual aesthetic taste, yet learning such preferences commonly depends on private photos and ratings that are unsuitable for centralized collection. The task must infer preference from sparse, heterogeneous feedback and translate it into natural-looking color transformations on resource-constrained user devices. We introduce FedPAIE, a federated personalized aesthetic image enhancement framework for user-adaptive color grading without centralizing raw photos or ratings. FedPAIE trains a lightweight dual-cue aesthetic scorer, calibrates it into a personalized scorer on a small local support set, and freezes it to guide regularized adaptation of a lightweight CLUT enhancer from unpaired local photographs. Fidelity constraints and an excess-gap penalty regularize scorer-guided adaptation to limit proxy-score over-optimization while preserving content and natural appearance. Training remains lightweight throughout the pipeline: scorer learning updates at most 0.787M parameters, enhancer adaptation updates 0.265M, and inference retains only a 0.293M-parameter personalized enhancer. Experiments on MIT-Adobe FiveK and Flickr-AES demonstrate effective open-world personalization and a favorable balance between user preference and image fidelity. FedPAIE thus connects decentralized preference learning with efficient personalized image transformation without requiring paired user retouches.