EditReward: A Human-Aligned Reward Model for Instruction-Guided Image
  Editing
Authors: name: Keming Wu; name: Sicong Jiang; name: Max Ku; name: Ping Nie; name: Minghao Liu; name: Wenhu Chen
Published: 2025-09-30 14:51:04

Abstract: Recently, we have witnessed great progress in image editing with natural
language instructions. Several closed-source models like GPT-Image-1, Seedream,
and Google-Nano-Banana have shown highly promising progress. However, the
open-source models are still lagging. The main bottleneck is the lack of a
reliable reward model to scale up high-quality synthetic training data. To
address this critical bottleneck, we built \mname, trained with our new
large-scale human preference dataset, meticulously annotated by trained experts
following a rigorous protocol containing over 200K preference pairs. \mname
demonstrates superior alignment with human preferences in instruction-guided
image editing tasks. Experiments show that \mname achieves state-of-the-art
human correlation on established benchmarks such as GenAI-Bench, AURORA-Bench,
ImagenHub, and our new \benchname, outperforming a wide range of VLM-as-judge
models. Furthermore, we use \mname to select a high-quality subset from the
existing noisy ShareGPT-4o-Image dataset. We train Step1X-Edit on the selected
subset, which shows significant improvement over training on the full set. This
demonstrates \mname's ability to serve as a reward model to scale up
high-quality training data for image editing. Furthermore, its strong alignment
suggests potential for advanced applications like reinforcement learning-based
post-training and test-time scaling of image editing models. \mname with its
training dataset will be released to help the community build more high-quality
image editing training datasets.