JoPPO: Hierarchical Photography Assessment via Contrastive Joint Conditional Probabilistic Reinforcement Learning

The value of a photograph lies not in what it contains, but in what it is about. -John SzarkowskiWith the advancement of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), employing VLM-as-a-Judge for visual evaluation has become a widely adopted metric in vision research. However, existing VLM-as-a-Judge approaches suffer from biased scoring outcomes with low discrimination and lack the capacity for unified multi-attribute compositional assessment. To address these limitations, we propose a novel training paradigm, termed JoPPO (Joint Probabilistic Policy Optimization) that enables the VLMs to learn ranking under compositional assessment constraints. We evaluate the JoPPO on image aesthetics as a testbed, a task requiring nuanced understanding of multiple attributes including composition, lighting, color and geometry. Training follows two stages: (1) Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on synthetic composition dataset provided by automated data generation pipeline to instill compositional priors; and (2) Contrastive Joint Conditional Probabilistic Reinforcement Learning: building upon the GRPO algorithm, we introduce JoPPO, which compute reward based on the expected win rate of total scores derived from the conditional distribution of fine-grained attribute scores within batches, effectively enhancing the model’s discriminative ability in composite evaluation. Across standard aesthetic benchmarks, our method achieves consistent improvements in ranking consistency, demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization.