CheckDistill: Adaptive Checklist Distillation for Efficient Distributional Reward Modeling in Image Editing
Abstract: Reinforcement learning for instruction-guided image editing requires reward models that provide reliable, accurate, and efficient feedback. Direct scalar prediction compresses multidimensional editing preferences, whereas generative evaluators can expose their judgment through explicit reasoning. However, broad scoring criteria do not specify all instance-dependent editing and preservation constraints, and generating long reasoning trajectories is costly for online optimization. We introduce CheckDistill, a pointwise reward modeling framework that internalizes instruction-adaptive checklists. We decompose each editing condition into atomic, independently verifiable requirements and construct four-dimensional scoring labels together with structured verification evidence. After supervised score initialization, a privileged teacher conditions on checklists, item-level judgments, and dimension-level rationales to supervise the student's own scoring trajectories. A reliability-weighted on-policy self-distillation objective adjusts supervision at score tokens according to agreement between the teacher's expected scores and reference labels, while retaining candidate probability weights in a truncated token support. The deployed student directly predicts four score distributions without checklist inputs or explicit reasoning and aggregates their expectations into a scalar reward. CheckDistill achieves aggregate accuracies of 72.30%, 56.67% and 82.90% on MMRB2, MER-Bench and EditReward-Bench, respectively, exceeding the compared open-source baselines on all three metrics.