IRIS: Interpolative Rényi Iterative Self-play for Large Language Model Fine-Tuning

Self-play fine-tuning enables large language models to improve beyond supervised fine-tuning without additional human annotations by contrasting annotated responses with self-generated ones. Many existing methods rely on a fixed divergence regime. SPIN is closely related to a KL-based regime, SPACE to a Jensen-Shannon-style objective via noise contrastive estimation, and SPIF to $χ^2$-regularized self-play. Since these divergences exhibit different strengths depending on the distributional gap between model and target, no single choice appears to provide favorable learning dynamics across training stages. We propose IRIS (Interpolative Rényi Iterative Self-play), a Rényi-based self-play fine-tuning framework with a continuously adjustable objective. IRIS decomposes into two independent tilted risk terms over annotated and synthetic data, with exponential importance weights controlled by the order parameter $α$. We show that several self-play objectives can be interpreted as limiting or representative regimes at particular values of $α$, providing a unified theoretical perspective on these methods. An adaptive order schedule further adjusts $α$ to the distributional gap, shifting from sharper importance weighting early in training to smoother refinement near convergence. Theoretically, we establish the fixed-point property of IRIS and analyze how $α$ controls gradient concentration. Experiments on Zephyr-7B and Qwen2.5-3B across ten benchmarks show that IRIS improves upon baselines, reaching 44.57\% average score with gains across iterations. In our setting, IRIS with only 26$k$ annotated samples surpasses standard supervised fine-tuning trained on the full 200$k$ dataset.

NTIRE 2026 The 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) Challenge: Professional Image Quality Assessment (Track 1)

In this paper, we present an overview of the NTIRE 2026 challenge on the 3rd Restore Any Image Model in the Wild, specifically focusing on Track 1: Professional Image Quality Assessment. Conventional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) typically relies on scalar scores. By compressing complex visual characteristics into a single number, these methods fundamentally struggle to distinguish subtle differences among uniformly high-quality images. Furthermore, they fail to articulate why one image is superior, lacking the reasoning capabilities required to provide guidance for vision tasks. To bridge this gap, recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising paradigm. Inspired by this potential, our challenge establishes a novel benchmark exploring the ability of MLLMs to mimic human expert cognition in evaluating high-quality image pairs. Participants were tasked with overcoming critical bottlenecks in professional scenarios, centering on two primary objectives: (1) Comparative Quality Selection: reliably identifying the visually superior image within a high-quality pair; and (2) Interpretative Reasoning: generating grounded, expert-level explanations that detail the rationale behind the selection. In total, the challenge attracted nearly 200 registrations and over 2,500 submissions. The top-performing methods significantly advanced the state of the art in professional IQA. The challenge dataset is available at https://github.com/narthchin/RAIM-PIQA, and the official homepage is accessible at https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12789/.

ViDA-UGC: Detailed Image Quality Analysis via Visual Distortion Assessment for UGC Images

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have introduced a paradigm shift for Image Quality Assessment (IQA) from unexplainable image quality scoring to explainable IQA, demonstrating practical applications like quality control and optimization guidance. However, current explainable IQA methods not only inadequately use the same distortion criteria to evaluate both User-Generated Content (UGC) and AI-Generated Content (AIGC) images, but also lack detailed quality analysis for monitoring image quality and guiding image restoration. In this study, we establish the first large-scale Visual Distortion Assessment Instruction Tuning Dataset for UGC images, termed ViDA-UGC, which comprises 11K images with fine-grained quality grounding, detailed quality perception, and reasoning quality description data. This dataset is constructed through a distortion-oriented pipeline, which involves human subject annotation and a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) assessment framework. This framework guides GPT-4o to generate quality descriptions by identifying and analyzing UGC distortions, which helps capturing rich low-level visual features that inherently correlate with distortion patterns. Moreover, we carefully select 476 images with corresponding 6,149 question answer pairs from ViDA-UGC and invite a professional team to ensure the accuracy and quality of GPT-generated information. The selected and revised data further contribute to the first UGC distortion assessment benchmark, termed ViDA-UGC-Bench. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ViDA-UGC and CoT framework for consistently enhancing various image quality analysis abilities across multiple base MLLMs on ViDA-UGC-Bench and Q-Bench, even surpassing GPT-4o.

NTIRE 2025 challenge on Text to Image Generation Model Quality Assessment

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2025 challenge on Text to Image (T2I) generation model quality assessment, which will be held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement Workshop (NTIRE) at CVPR 2025. The aim of this challenge is to address the fine-grained quality assessment of text-to-image generation models. This challenge evaluates text-to-image models from two aspects: image-text alignment and image structural distortion detection, and is divided into the alignment track and the structural track. The alignment track uses the EvalMuse-40K, which contains around 40K AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) generated by 20 popular generative models. The alignment track has a total of 371 registered participants. A total of 1,883 submissions are received in the development phase, and 507 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 12 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. The structure track uses the EvalMuse-Structure, which contains 10,000 AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) with corresponding structural distortion mask. A total of 211 participants have registered in the structure track. A total of 1155 submissions are received in the development phase, and 487 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 8 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Almost all methods have achieved better results than baseline methods, and the winning methods in both tracks have demonstrated superior prediction performance on T2I model quality assessment.

ChatHouseDiffusion: Prompt-Guided Generation and Editing of Floor Plans

The generation and editing of floor plans are critical in architectural planning, requiring a high degree of flexibility and efficiency. Existing methods demand extensive input information and lack the capability for interactive adaptation to user modifications. This paper introduces ChatHouseDiffusion, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to interpret natural language input, employs graphormer to encode topological relationships, and uses diffusion models to flexibly generate and edit floor plans. This approach allows iterative design adjustments based on user ideas, significantly enhancing design efficiency. Compared to existing models, ChatHouseDiffusion achieves higher Intersection over Union (IoU) scores, permitting precise, localized adjustments without the need for complete redesigns, thus offering greater practicality. Experiments demonstrate that our model not only strictly adheres to user specifications but also facilitates a more intuitive design process through its interactive capabilities.