ICLR 2026oral0 citations

Omni-Reward: Towards Generalist Omni-Modal Reward Modeling with Free-Form Preferences

Zhuoran Jin, Hongbang Yuan, Kejian Zhu, Jiachun Li, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao

Abstract

Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in aligning AI behaviors with human preferences, yet they face two fundamental challenges: (1) Modality Imbalance, where most RMs are mainly focused on text and image modalities, offering limited support for video, audio, and other modalities; and (2) Preference Rigidity, where training on fixed binary preference pairs fails to capture the complexity and diversity of personalized preferences. To address the above challenges, we propose Omni-Reward, a step toward generalist omni-modal reward modeling with support for free-form preferences, consisting of: (1) Evaluation: We introduce Omni-RewardBench, the first omni-modal RM benchmark with free-form preferences, covering nine tasks across five modalities including text, image, video, audio, and 3D; (2) Data: We construct Omni-RewardData, a multimodal preference dataset comprising 248K general preference pairs and 69K instruction-tuning pairs for training generalist omni-modal RMs; (3) Model: We propose Omni-RewardModel, which includes both discriminative and generative RMs, and achieves strong performance on Omni-RewardBench as well as other widely used reward modeling benchmarks.

Omni-Modal ModelsReward ModelsAlignment
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
jin2026omnireward,
title={Omni-Reward: Towards Generalist Omni-Modal Reward Modeling with Free-Form Preferences},
author={Zhuoran Jin and Hongbang Yuan and Kejian Zhu and Jiachun Li and Pengfei Cao and Yubo Chen and Kang Liu and Jun Zhao},
booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=9C4gVbPqSy}
}
Omni-Reward: Towards Generalist Omni-Modal Reward Modeling with Free-Form Preferences · ICLR 2026