Unified Reward Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generation

We release the UnifiedReward -- the first unified reward model for multimodal understanding and generation assessment, enabling both pairwise ranking and pointwise scoring, which can be employed for vision model preference alignment.

🔥🔥 We release UnifiedReward-qwen-[3b/7b/32b], the more powerful unified reward models built upon Qwen2.5-VL-Instruct!!

🔥 We release vLLM inference code for UnifiedReward-qwen in vllm_qwen directory!

🔥 We release SGLang inference code for UnifiedReward-llava in sglang_llava directory!

😊 We appreciate the excellent work Delving into RL for Image Generation with CoT: A Study on DPO vs. GRPO, which provides further evidence of the robustness and effectiveness of UnifiedReward in image generation RL tasks.

Method	HPS	ImageReward	UnifiedReward
Janus-Pro + DPO	77.3	77.7	80.0
Janus-Pro + GRPO	79.2	79.3	81.0
Janus-Pro + Best-of-4	82.1	82.4	84.5

😊 We appreciate the Flow-GRPO team for using UnifiedReward-7B as their image generation quality evaluation metric!

😊 We appreciate the mradermacher team for providing the GGUF version of our models!!

😊 We sincerely thank the Hunyuan team of Tencent for providing the evaluation results on several T2I models using UnifiedReward-qwen-7b!! The evaluation was conducted on 400 prompts sourced from here.

Model	Alignment	Coherence	Style
Flux-pro-ultra	3.6453	3.8193	3.4971
Imagen-4.0	3.6792	3.8049	3.4756
Recraft-v3	3.6611	3.8409	3.5158
OpenAI-GPT-image-1	3.6890	3.8448	3.4960
Imagen-3.0	3.6733	3.8027	3.4674
Seedream-3.0	3.6927	3.8218	3.4887

🔥🔥🔥 UnifiedReward-Think

Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reward Model through Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

We release UnifiedReward-Think -- the first unified multimodal CoT reward model, capable of multi-dimensional, step-by-step long-chain reasoning for both visual understanding and generation reward tasks.

Please refer to the project page for details.

🔥🔥 We release UnifiedReward-Think-qwen-7b, a more powerful unified multimodal CoT reward model built upon UnifiedReward-qwen-7b!!!!

🔥🔥 We released Gradio for UnifiedReward-Think!

🔥 News

😊 We are actively gathering feedback from the community to improve our models. We welcome your input and encourage you to stay updated through our repository!!

Please leave us a star ⭐ if you find our work helpful.

• [2025/5] 🔥🔥 We released [UnifiedReward-qwen-[3b/7b/32b], the more powerful unified reward models built upon Qwen2.5-VL-Instruct!!(https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct)! All its inference and evaluation codes are provided in ./inference_qwen and ./benchmark_evaluation directory, respectively.

• [2025/5] 🔥🔥 We released UnifiedReward-Think-7b, the first unified multimodal CoT reward model. See project page for details.

• [2025/4] 🔥🔥 We released UnifiedReward-0.5B. Feel free to use it based on your needs.

• [2025/4] 🔥🔥 We updated UnifiedReward-7B, incorporating valuable feedback from the community, and released UnifiedReward-7B-v1.5 by introducing pointwise scoring for generated images across three dimensions: alignment, coherence, and style, each rated on a continuous scale from 1 to 5.

  1. Alignment quantifies how well an image matches its prompt.
  2. Coherence assesses the logical consistency of the image and the absence of artifacts or visual glitches.
  3. Style reflects the visual appeal of the image, independent of the prompt.

  Welcome to try the latest version, and the inference code is in inference_qwen/image_generation/qwen_point_score_ACS_image_generation.py and ./inference/point_score_ACS_image_generation.py.

• [2025/3] 🔥🔥 We released all training datasets and model checkpoints.

• [2025/3] 🔥🔥 We released all training, inference, and evaluation code.

• [2025/3] 🔥 We launched the project page and paper.

🏁 Compared with Current Reward Models

Reward Model	Method	Image Generation	Image Understanding	Video Generation	Video Understanding
PickScore	Point	√
HPS	Point	√
ImageReward	Point	√
LLaVA-Critic	Pair/Point		√
IXC-2.5-Reward	Pair/Point		√		√
VideoScore	Point			√
LiFT	Point			√
VisionReward	Point	√		√
VideoReward	Point			√
UnifiedReward (Ours)	Pair/Point	√	√	√	√

VLRewardBench Comparison Results

Models	General	Hallu.	Reason.	Overall Accuracy	Macro Accuracy
Gemini-1.5-Pro	50.8	72.5	64.2	67.2	62.5
GPT-4o	49.1	67.6	70.5	65.8	62.4
LLaVA-Critic	47.4	38.5	53.8	46.9	46.6
OV-7B	32.2	20.1	57.1	29.6	36.5
UnifiedReward	76.5	58.1	65.1	67.5	66.6

---

GenAI-Bench(Image) Comparison Results

Method	GenAI-Bench
	tau	diff
PickScore	53.2	67.2
HPSv2	51.6	68.4
ImageReward	47.8	65.0
VisionReward	46.8	66.4
OV-7B	39.7	53.2
UnifiedReward	54.8	70.9

---

GenAI-Bench(Video) and VideoGen-Reward Comparison Results

Method	GenAI-Bench		VideoGen-Reward
	tau	diff	tau	diff
VideoScore	46.2	70.6	42.1	49.9
LiFT	41.2	60.1	40.6	58.3
VisionReward	52.1	73.1	57.4	68.2
VideoReward	50.2	73.3	60.1	73.9
OV-7B	40.8	51.4	40.4	50.2
UnifiedReward	60.7	77.2	66.6	79.3

🔧 Environment Set Up

1. Clone this repository and navigate to the UnifiedReward folder:

git clone https://github.com/CodeGoat24/UnifiedReward.git
cd UnifiedReward

2. Install the inference package:

conda create -n unifiedreward python=3.10 -y
conda activate unifiedreward
pip install --upgrade pip  
pip install -e ".[train]"
pip install flash_attn==2.5.8 --no-build-isolation

🚀 Inference

For Qwen2.5-VL based UnifiedReward models, you should first install the inference packages as follows:

pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/transformers accelerate qwen-vl-utils[decord]==0.0.8

We provide reference pair ranking and point score inference code for each task in the ./inference and ./inference_qwen directories.

inference
├── image_generation                  
    ├── pair_rank_image_generation.py            
    └── point_score_image_generation.py         
├── video_understanding                 
    ├── pair_rank_video_understanding.py            
    └── point_score_video_understanding.py
... 

Note that our model is not constrained to a fixed input prompt style. You can flexibly adjust inputs based on your requirements.

1. vLLM Inference

We provide vLLM inference code for UnifiedReward-qwen in vllm_qwen directory.

1. Install vLLM

pip install vllm==0.9.0.1 transformers==4.52.4

2. Deploy vLLM Server

bash vllm_qwen/vllm_server.sh

3. Inference Request to vLLM Server

python vllm_qwen/vllm_inference.py

2. SGLang Inference

We provide SGLang inference code for UnifiedReward-llava in sglang_llava directory.

1. Install SGLang

pip install "sglang[all]"

2. Deploy SGLang Server

bash sglang_llava/sglang_server.sh

3. Inference Request to SGLang Server

python sglang_llava/sglang_inference.py

💻 Training UnifiedReward

1. Training based on Qwen2.5-VL-Instruct (Recommended)

We use LLaMA-Factory to train the SFT model.

1. Clone the LLaMA-Factory repository and install the dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/hiyouga/LLaMA-Factory.git
cd LLaMA-Factory
pip install -e ".[torch,metrics]"

Follow its README to prepare our released datasets.

2. Run the following command to train the SFT model.

llamafactory-cli train examples/train_full/qwen2_5vl_full_sft.yaml

2. Training based on LLaVA-Onevision

2.1 Unified Preference Training Dataset Preparation

Please download our constructed unified preference dataset from Huggingface and put it in ./dataset/.

dataset
├── EvalMuse                  
    ├── pairwise            
    └── pointwise
    └── ...            
└── HPD                   
└── LiFT-HRA
└── LLaVA-Critic 
    ├── pairwise            
    └── pointwise
    └── ...
└── OIP
└── ShareGPTVideo
    ├── pairwise            
    └── pointwise
    └── ...      
└── VideoDPO 
└── VideoFeedback
└── train_data.yaml

2.2 Training based on LLaVA-Onevision

bash train.sh

✨ Direct Preference Optimization

🎨 Image and Video Understanding DPO

1. Construct Preference data

The data for preference data construction should adhere to the following structure:

[
    {
    "prompt": "",
    "image": "",
    },
    ...
]

Then

# image understanding 
cd preference_data_construction/image_understanding
python infer+sift.py # you need to fill the 'image_folder' and 'data_path' in this file

# video understanding 
cd preference_data_construction/video_understanding
python infer+sift.py # you need to fill the 'image_folder' and 'data_path' in this file

2. Training

The training data format in data.json should adhere to the following structure:

[
    {
    "id": "",
    "image": "",
    "prompt": "",
    "chosen": "",
    "rejected": ""
    },
    ...
]

Then start training:

# image understanding 
bash dpo_image_understand_ov7b.sh 

# video understanding 
bash dpo_video_understand_llava_video_7b.sh

🖼️ Image Generation DPO

Prepare Environments

cd DiffusionDPO
conda create -n diffdpo python=3.10 -y
conda activate diffdpo
pip install -r requirements.txt

1. Construct Preference data

Image Generation

The data for preference data construction should adhere to the following structure:

[
    {
    "prompt": "",
    },
    ...
]

Then

python data_generation.py # you need to fill the 'data_path' in this file

Preference Pair Data Construction

python sift_dpo_data.py

2. Training

The training data format in data.json should adhere to the following structure:

[
    {
        "id": "",
        "caption": "",
        "jpg_0": "", #chosen image path
        "jpg_1": "", #rejected image path
        "label_0": 1,
    },
    ...
]

Then start training:

bash launchers/turbo_dpo.sh

🎬 Video Generation DPO

Prepare Environments

cd VideoDPO
conda create -n videodpo python=3.10 -y
conda activate videodpo
pip install -r requirements.txt

Prepare Checkpoints

Run following instruction to download VideoCrafter checkpoints.

mkdir -p checkpoints/vc2
wget -P checkpoints/vc2 https://huggingface.co/VideoCrafter/VideoCrafter2/resolve/main/model.ckpt

Please download our constructed T2V-Turbo model and its reference model from Huggingface and put it in ./checkpoints/t2v-turbo.

1. Construct Preference data

Video Generation

The data for preference data construction should adhere to the following structure:

[
    {
    "prompt": "",
    },
    ...
]

Then

bash data_generation.sh # you need to fill '--prompts_file' in this file

Preference Pair Data Construction

python sift_dpo_data.py

2. Training

The training data format in data.json should adhere to the following structure:

[
    {
        "id": "",
        "caption": "",
        "chosen": "", # chosen video path
        "rejected": "", # rejected video path
    },
    ...
]

Then start training:

bash run.sh

🚀 Evaluation

We provide several evaluation code in ./benchmark_evaluation directory.

Reward model

We provide evaluation code for GenAI-Bench-Video, GenAI-Bench-Image, VideoGen-RewardBench and VL-RewardBench benchmarks.

Video Understanding

We provide evaluation code for MSRVTT, MSVD, and TGIF benchmarks while using the VLMEvalKit toolkit for evaluating LongVideoBench, MLVU, and Video-MME benchmarks with 64 input frames.

Image Understanding

We use LMMs-Eval toolkit to evaluate LLaVABench, WildVision, LLaVABench-Wilder, LiveBench, and MMHal benchmarks.

Image Generation

We utilize the image reward model, i.e., PickScore, HPS and ImageReward for quality assessment.

Video Generation

VBench is used for video generation assessment.

📧 Contact

If you have any comments or questions, please open a new issue or feel free to contact Yibin Wang.

🤗 Acknowledgments

In this work, reward model and image/video understanding DPO code is based on LLaVA-Next, while image and video generation DPO is based on DiffusionDPO and VideoDPO.

We also utilize LMMs-Eval and VLMEvalKit toolkits for evaluation.

Thanks to all the contributors!

⭐ Citation

@article{UnifiedReward-Think,
  title={Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reward Model through Reinforcement Fine-Tuning.},
  author={Wang, Yibin and Li, Zhimin and Zang, Yuhang and Wang, Chunyu and Lu, Qinglin, and Jin, Cheng and Wang, Jiaqi},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.03318},
  year={2025}
}

@article{UnifiedReward,
  title={Unified Reward Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generation.},
  author={Wang, Yibin and Zang, Yuhang and Li, Hao and Jin, Cheng and Wang, Jiaqi},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.05236},
  year={2025}
}