A Test-time Actor-Critic Approach to News Images Generation

This paper introduces the CERTH-ITI solution for the MediaEval NewsImages 2026 challenge, which focuses on generating images related to news headlines. Inspired by the Actor-Critic paradigm in reinforcement learning, we present a test-time, model-agnostic Actor-Critic Image Generation approach (ACIG). ACIG generates prompts for image creation, produces the images, evaluates the generated results, and if needed refines the image generation prompts accordingly in a feedback loop. ACIG achieved the best results in the NewsImages 2026 challenge, according to the challenge's leaderboard.