TRM first writes a case-adaptive rubric before scoring, beating open-source reward models and nearing proprietary ones on image generation and editing benchmarks
The work introduces the "Think Before You Score" paradigm and the Thinking Reward Model (TRM), which first generates a case-adaptive rubric for each task condition and candidate output, then inspects the candidate criterion by criterion and aggregates the evidence into a fine-grained pointwise reward; it also proposes PD-GRPO to use pairwise preference supervision for better discrimination while mitigating score polarization, and reports state-of-the-art results among open-source reward models on image generation and editing reward-modeling benchmarks, highly competitive with proprietary alternatives, with TRM-guided reinforcement learning consistently improving diverse visual generation models.