SmartPhotoCrafter: Unified Reasoning, Generation and Optimization for Automatic Photographic Image Editing

Traditional photographic image editing typically requires users to possess sufficient aesthetic understanding to provide appropriate instructions for adjusting image quality and camera parameters. However, this paradigm relies on explicit human instruction of aesthetic intent, which is often ambiguous, incomplete, or inaccessible to non-expert users. In this work, we propose SmartPhotoCrafter, an automatic photographic image editing method which formulates image editing as a tightly coupled reasoning-to-generation process. The proposed model first performs image quality comprehension and identifies deficiencies by the Image Critic module, and then the Photographic Artist module realizes targeted edits to enhance image appeal, eliminating the need for explicit human instructions. A multi-stage training pipeline is adopted: (i) Foundation pretraining to establish basic aesthetic understanding and editing capabilities, (ii) Adaptation with reasoning-guided multi-edit supervision to incorporate rich semantic guidance, and (iii) Coordinated reasoning-to generation reinforcement learning to jointly optimize reasoning and generation. During training, SmartPhotoCrafter emphasizes photo-realistic image generation, while supporting both image restoration and retouching tasks with consistent adherence to color- and tone-related semantics. We also construct a stage-specific dataset, which progressively builds reasoning and controllable generation, effective cross-module collaboration, and ultimately high-quality photographic enhancement. Experiments demonstrate that SmartPhotoCrafter outperforms existing generative models on the task of automatic photographic enhancement, achieving photo-realistic results while exhibiting higher tonal sensitivity to retouching instructions. Project page: https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/SmartPhotoCrafter.

MixCut:A Data Augmentation Method for Facial Expression Recognition

In the facial expression recognition task, researchers always get low accuracy of expression classification due to a small amount of training samples. In order to solve this kind of problem, we proposes a new data augmentation method named MixCut. In this method, we firstly interpolate the two original training samples at the pixel level in a random ratio to generate new samples. Then, pixel removal is performed in random square regions on the new samples to generate the final training samples. We evaluated the MixCut method on Fer2013Plus and RAF-DB. With MixCut, we achieved 85.63% accuracy in eight-label classification on Fer2013Plus and 87.88% accuracy in seven-label classification on RAF-DB, effectively improving the classification accuracy of facial expression image recognition. Meanwhile, on Fer2013Plus, MixCut achieved performance improvements of +0.59%, +0.36%, and +0.39% compared to the other three data augmentation methods: CutOut, Mixup, and CutMix, respectively. MixCut improves classification accuracy on RAF-DB by +0.22%, +0.65%, and +0.5% over these three data augmentation methods.