Existing instruction-based image editing models perform well with simple, single-step instructions but degrade in realistic scenarios that involve multiple, lengthy, and interdependent directives. A main cause is the scarcity of training data with complex multi-instruction annotations. However, it is costly to collect such data and retrain these models. To address this challenge, we propose MSRAMIE, a training-free agent framework built on Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). MSRAMIE takes existing editing models as plug-in components and handle multi-instruction tasks via structured multimodal reasoning. It orchestrates iterative interactions between an MLLM-based Instructor and an image editing Actor, introducing a novel reasoning topology that comprises the proposed Tree-of-States and Graph-of-References. During inference, complex instructions are decomposed into multiple editing steps which enable state transitions, cross-step information aggregation, and original input recall, which enables systematic exploration of the image editing space and flexible progressive output refinement. The visualizable inference topology further provides interpretable and controllable decision pathways. Experiments show that as the instruction complexity increases, MSRAMIE can improve instruction following over 15% and increases the probability of finishing all modifications in a single run over 100%, while preserving perceptual quality and maintaining visual consistency.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Performance Degradation Under Multi-instruction. Existing models degrade when directly dealing with lengthy multi-instructions, manifested by poor instruction following and identity preservation that worsen with increasing complexity (1st row). MSRAMIE mitigates these issues (2nd row). Colored text under the input image stands for different parts of the editing multi-instructions, corresponding to color blocks under each image. A red cross stands for a failed instruction.
Figure 2: MSRAMIE Architecture. Iterative interactions between the Instructor and Actor progressively construct an inference topology, where each state corresponds to one round of interaction. Transition and reference links among states form a Tree-of-States and a Graph-of-References , enabling multiple decision paths, or Chain-of-States , containing progressively refined candidate solutions in the image editing space. All states retain access to the root state for the original inputs during their creation.
Figure 3: Image Editing Space Exploration by Structured Multimodal Reasoning. MSRAMIE creates a visualizable reasoning topology. States on a decision path dynamically focus on different parts of the original lengthy multi-instruction, with referencing to nearby states to prevent duplicated exploration. Inference topology expands in depth-first style, providing a transparent and controllable editing process.
Figure 4: Instructor - Actor Interaction Process (left) and Instructor Submodules Process (right). Four Instructor submodules coordinate with the Actor to create a new state. One may refer to Figure 2 for the meaning of state colors.
Figure 5: A Sample of Complex-Edit. Each non-synthetic image is accompanied with lengthy multi-instructions of 7 complexity levels. Higher complexity leads to more and lengthier editing requirements.
VQAScore (↑)
Models
QwenImageEdit
FluxKontext
FluxKlein
Complexity
Direct
MSRAMIE
Improvement
Direct
MSRAMIE
Improvement
Direct
MSRAMIE
Improvement
1
0.8088
0.8760
8.31%
0.7884
0.8659
9.84%
0.8898
0.9315
4.68%
2
0.8041
0.8947
11.27%
0.7779
0.8692
11.74%
0.9134
0.9441
3.36%
3
0.7795
0.8854
13.59%
0.7667
0.8705
13.54%
0.9134
0.9543
4.49%
4
0.7530
0.8768
16.44%
0.7331
0.8599
17.30%
0.8934
0.9383
5.03%
Table 1: Performance enhancement by MSRAMIE. Baseline models exhibit consistent performance degradation as instruction complexity increases. In contrast, MSRAMIE delivers progressively greater IF (VQAScore & CIF) improvements under higher instruction complexity, with enhanced IP (CLIP-I) and largely preserved PQ (FID). This demonstrates its effectiveness in challenging multi-instruction scenarios.
Figure 6: Direct Editing vs. MSRAMIE-augmented Editing. Colored blocks beneath each image denote individual instruction items, and a red cross indicates failure to satisfy the corresponding item. Regions where visual content of original images is not preserved in Direct Editing but retained by MSRAMIE are highlighted with red boxes.
Metrics
Direct
Resampling-Only
CoS-Only
ToS-Only
MSRAMIE
VQAScore(↑)
0.7623
0.7917
0.8115
0.8666
0.8819
Improvement
-
3.85%
6.50%
13.83%
15.89%
CIF(↑)
0.3497
0.4036
0.5056
0.5895
0.6008
Improvement
-
17.45%
57.52%
90.19%
94.82%
Table 2: Instruction Following Ablation Test. Results aggregated across all instruction complexities and all samples, with improvements reported relative to direct editing.
Metrics
Direct
Resampling-Only
Direct
CoS-Only
Direct
ToS-Only
Direct
MSRAMIE
CLIP-I(↑)
0.9370
0.9388
0.9355
0.9354
0.9333
0.9365
0.9338
0.9376
Improvement
-
0.20%
-
0.00%
-
0.35%
-
0.41%
FID(↓)
91.27
90.89
107.54
110.38
108.24
108.81
107.91
107.78
Improvement
-
0.42%
-
-2.64%
-
-0.52%
-
0.12%
Table 3: Identity Preservation & Perceptual Quality Ablation Test. Because of the trade-off among IF, IP, and PQ, IF is controlled in the IP/PQ ablation by selecting only samples from direct editing and MSRAMIE with identical VQAScore. Enhancement is then quantified by the CLIP-I percentage increase and the FID percentage decrease.
Figure A1 : Inference Topology Size Across Complexities.
Topology Size Statistics
Complexity
QwenImageEdit
FluxKontext
FluxKlein
Average Size
Std Err
Average Size
Std Err
Average Size
Std Err
1
2.39
1.09
2.17
1.05
2.12
1.02
2
3.84
1.53
3.65
1.49
3.69
1.59
3
4.76
2.04
4.70
2.09
4.49
2.00
4
6.51
2.50
6.24
2.48
6.32
2.38
Table A1 : Average Topology Size vs . Complexity & Linear Model Fitting.
Figure B1 : Performance vs . Inference Steps. (1) As complexity increases, all the four metrics degrades. (2) On the same level of complexity, as the number of carried steps increases, Instruction Following metrics are greatly improved while Identity Preservation and Perceptual Quality metrics degrade, reflecting a trade-off among these three dimensions.
Figure B2 : Performance vs . Inference Depth. (1) As complexity increases, all the four metrics degrades. (2) As the inference depth increases, Instruction Following is improved, Identity Preservation and Perceptual Quality degrades because more edited contents deviate the result further from the original image, and repeated image encoding and decoding lead to the loss of details.
VQAScore( ↑ )
Complexity
Direct
Resampling-Only
CoS-Only
ToS-Only
MSRAMIE
1
0.8088
0.8514
0.8396
0.8836
0.8760
2
0.8041
0.8283
0.8449
0.8750
0.8947
3
0.7795
0.8037
0.8280
0.8738
0.8854
4
0.7530
0.7794
0.8000
0.8674
0.8768
5
0.7412
0.7706
0.8183
0.8578
0.8870
Table C1 : VQAScore Ablation Test Results.
CIFScore( ↑ )
Complexity
Direct
Resampling-Only
CoS-Only
ToS-Only
MSRAMIE
1
0.6064
0.6930
0.6855
0.7382
0.7307
2
0.5292
0.5819
0.6554
0.7100
0.7307
3
0.4011
0.4407
0.5687
0.6441
0.6478
4
0.3032
0.3503
0.4769
0.5857
0.6008
5
0.2241
0.2976
0.4444
0.5141
0.5405
Table C2 : CIF Ablation Test Results.
CLIP-I( ↑ )
Complexity
Direct
Resampling-Only
Improvement
P-value
Direct
CoS-Only
Improvement
P-value
1
0.9542
0.9562
0.20%
2.62E-09
0.9524
0.9536
0.12%
8.15E-02
2
0.9441
0.9463
0.24%
3.02E-09
0.9420
0.9421
0.02%
8.63E-01
3
0.9389
0.9409
0.22%
2.24E-07
0.9381
0.9362
-0.20%
6.16E-02
4
0.9324
0.9341
0.18%
3.90E-04
0.9317
0.9299
-0.19%
1.56E-01
5
0.9318
0.9336
0.19%
1.44E-07
0.9261
0.9266
0.06%
7.12E-01
Table C3 : CLIP-I Ablation Test Results.
FID( ↓ )
Complexity
Direct
Resampling-Only
Improvement
Direct
CoS-Only
Improvement
1
72.56
72.33
0.32%
76.86
76.71
0.20%
2
80.09
80.01
0.10%
88.37
89.92
-1.75%
3
88.58
87.57
1.14%
100.31
105.25
-4.92%
4
95.34
96.12
-0.82%
127.35
132.21
-3.82%
5
99.51
97.09
2.43%
132.91
135.53
-1.97%
Table C4 : FID Ablation Test Results. P-value is not computed as for CLIP-I, because FID is not computed image-wisely but between the original and edited image sets.
Modules
Hyperparams
Value
General
MaxSteps
2*(C+1)
MLLM
Qwen3VL
MaxNTry
3
Instructor
InstructionVolume
2
Actor
ImageEditingPipeline
AnyModel
SearchRange
2
Table D1 : Quantitative Study Hyperparameter Settings. C stands for instruction complexity, which ranges from 1 to 7.
Modules
Hyperparams
Resampling-Only
CoS-Only
General
MaxSteps
2*(C+1)
2*(C+1)
MLLM
-
Qwen3VL
MaxNTry
-
3
Instructor
InstructionVolume
-
2
Actor
ImageEditingPipeline
QwenImageEdit
QwenImageEdit
SearchRange
0
0
Table D2 : Ablation Study Hyperparameter Settings. C stands for instruction complexity, which ranges from 1 to 7. Key hyperparameters that differentiate involved methods are colored.
Figure F1 : Visualizable Inference Topology. Task decomposition constructs diverse decision paths that lead to different editing results. Visualization of the inference topology show this process in a transparent way, enabling information check of every state.
Figure F2 : Performance Degradation Across Complexities & Enhancement by MSRAMIE. Colored blocks beneath each image denote individual instruction items, and a red cross indicates failure to satisfy the corresponding item. Regions where visual content of original images is not preserved in Direct Editing but retained by MSRAMIE are highlighted with red boxes.
With the rapid advancement of commercial multi-modal models, image editing has garnered significant attention due to its widespread applicability in daily life. Despite impressive progress, existing image editing systems, particularly closed-source or proprietary models, often struggle with complex, indirect, or multi-step user instructions. These limitations hinder their ability to perform nuanced, context-aware edits that align with human intent. In this work, we propose ImageEdit-R1, a multi-agent framework for intelligent image editing that leverages reinforcement learning to coordinate high-level decision-making across a set of specialized, pretrained vision-language and generative agents. Each agent is responsible for distinct capabilities--such as understanding user intent, identifying regions of interest, selecting appropriate editing actions, and synthesizing visual content--while reinforcement learning governs their collaboration to ensure coherent and goal-directed behavior. Unlike existing approaches that rely on monolithic models or hand-crafted pipelines, our method treats image editing as a sequential decision-making problem, enabling dynamic and context-aware editing strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that ImageEdit-R1 consistently outperforms both individual closed-source diffusion models and alternative multi-agent framework baselines across multiple image editing datasets.
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential for extending vision-language reasoning to professional tool-based image editing, enabling intuitive and creative editing. A promising direction is to use reinforcement learning (RL) to enable MLLMs to reason about and execute optimal tool-use plans within professional image-editing software. However, training remains challenging due to the lack of reliable, verifiable reward signals that can reflect the inherently subjective nature of creative editing. In this work, we introduce RetouchIQ, a framework that performs instruction-based executable image editing through MLLM agents guided by a generalist reward model. RetouchIQ interprets user-specified editing intentions and generates corresponding, executable image adjustments, bridging high-level aesthetic goals with precise parameter control. To move beyond conventional, rule-based rewards that compute similarity against a fixed reference image using handcrafted metrics, we propose a generalist reward model, an RL fine-tuned MLLM that evaluates edited results through a set of generated metrics on a case-by-case basis. Then, the reward model provides scalar feedback through multimodal reasoning, enabling reinforcement learning with high-quality, instruction-consistent gradients. We curate an extended dataset with 190k instruction-reasoning pairs and establish a new benchmark for instruction-based image editing. Experiments show that RetouchIQ substantially improves both semantic consistency and perceptual quality over previous MLLM-based and diffusion-based editing systems. Our findings demonstrate the potential of generalist reward-driven MLLM agents as flexible, explainable, and executable assistants for professional image editing.
Editing images via instruction provides a natural way to generate interactive content, but it is a big challenge due to the higher requirement of scene understanding and generation. Prior work utilizes a chain of large language models, object segmentation models, and editing models for this task. However, the understanding models provide only a single modality ability, restricting the editing quality. We aim to bridge understanding and generation via a new multi-modality model that provides the intelligent abilities to instruction-based image editing models for more complex cases. To achieve this goal, we individually separate the instruction editing task with the multi-modality chain of thought prompts, i.e., Chain-of-Thought (CoT) planning, editing region reasoning, and editing. For Chain-of-Thought planning, the large language model could reason the appropriate sub-prompts considering the instruction provided and the ability of the editing network. For editing region reasoning, we train an instruction-based editing region generation network with a multi-modal large language model. Finally, a hint-guided instruction-based editing network is proposed for editing image generations based on the sizeable text-to-image diffusion model to accept the hints for generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method has competitive editing abilities on complex real-world images.