ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation

Jiazheng Xu, Xiao Liu, Yuchen Wu, Yuxuan Tong, Qinkai Li +3 more
2/12/2026

No official code found. Best implementation: zai-org/ImageReward (1,706 stars, Apache-2.0, last commit 2025-10-29).

Abstract

We present a comprehensive solution to learn and improve text-to-image models from human preference feedback. To begin with, we build ImageReward -- the first general-purpose text-to-image human preference reward model -- to effectively encode human preferences. Its training is based on our systematic annotation pipeline including rating and ranking, which collects 137k expert comparisons to date. In human evaluation, ImageReward outperforms existing scoring models and metrics, making it a promising automatic metric for evaluating text-to-image synthesis. On top of it, we propose Reward Feedback Learning (ReFL), a direct tuning algorithm to optimize diffusion models against a scorer. Both automatic and human evaluation support ReFL's advantages over compared methods. All code and datasets are provided at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/ImageReward}.

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Code Implementations(1)

Apache-2.0

[NeurIPS 2023] ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-image Generation

1,70691Shell, PythonApr 1, 202311 months agoApache-2.0
diffusion-modelsgenerative-modelhuman-preferencesrlhf

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Cite this paper

@article{xu2026imagereward,
  title  = {ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation},
  author = {Jiazheng Xu and Xiao Liu and Yuchen Wu and Yuxuan Tong and Qinkai Li and Ming Ding and Jie Tang and Yuxiao Dong},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2304.05977},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.05977},
  journal = {NEURIPS 2023 2023}
}

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