PALATE: Personalized Aesthetic Learning through Adaptive Taste Evolution for Multi-User Portrait Retouching

Automatic portrait retouching has advanced rapidly, yet its objective is inherently subjective: the same portrait admits multiple professionally valid results, and users disagree about which one is best. Most existing methods optimize a population-level aesthetic standard and therefore cannot capture individual taste, while fine-tuning a separate editing model for every user incurs prohibitive training, storage, and data costs. We propose PALATE, a shared reward-evolution framework that keeps the image editor fixed and instead personalizes the selection among retouched candidates of the same source portrait. PALATE decomposes the reward for each user into a global backbone shared by all users, category-level residuals shared by aesthetically similar users, and a lightweight user adapter, with anti-collapse regularizers keeping the three levels complementary.A cyclic dual-level distillation scheme first distills user-specific preferences into category rewards and then consolidates the resulting category-level knowledge into the global backbone, which is redistributed to initialize the next evolution round. In this way, the shared initialization improves progressively across rounds, enabling unseen users to be calibrated from only a few rankings. On expert-retouched candidates from PPR10K with held-out users and held-out images, PALATE attains 72.83% pairwise preference-prediction accuracy, surpassing all reward, aesthetic, and image-quality baselines, of which the strongest, PickScore, reaches 58.06%. Each new user costs only 512 bytes of user-specific parameters and millisecond-level scoring.

Indescribable Multi-modal Spatial Evaluator

Multi-modal image registration spatially aligns two images with different distributions. One of its major challenges is that images acquired from different imaging machines have different imaging distributions, making it difficult to focus only on the spatial aspect of the images and ignore differences in distributions. In this study, we developed a self-supervised approach, Indescribable Multi-model Spatial Evaluator (IMSE), to address multi-modal image registration. IMSE creates an accurate multi-modal spatial evaluator to measure spatial differences between two images, and then optimizes registration by minimizing the error predicted of the evaluator. To optimize IMSE performance, we also proposed a new style enhancement method called Shuffle Remap which randomizes the image distribution into multiple segments, and then randomly disorders and remaps these segments, so that the distribution of the original image is changed. Shuffle Remap can help IMSE to predict the difference in spatial location from unseen target distributions. Our results show that IMSE outperformed the existing methods for registration using T1-T2 and CT-MRI datasets. IMSE also can be easily integrated into the traditional registration process, and can provide a convenient way to evaluate and visualize registration results. IMSE also has the potential to be used as a new paradigm for image-to-image translation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kid-Liet/IMSE.