Recent multimodal generation models have achieved remarkable progress on general-purpose generation tasks, yet continue to struggle with complex instructions and specialized downstream tasks. Inspired by the success of advanced agent frameworks such as Claude Code, we propose GEMS (Agent-Native Multimodal GEneration with Memory and Skills), a framework that pushes beyond the inherent limitations of foundational models on both general and downstream tasks. GEMS is built upon three core components. Agent Loop introduces a structured multi-agent framework that iteratively improves generation quality through closed-loop optimization. Agent Memory provides a persistent, trajectory-level memory that hierarchically stores both factual states and compressed experiential summaries, enabling a global view of the optimization process while reducing redundancy. Agent Skill offers an extensible collection of domain-specific expertise with on-demand loading, allowing the system to effectively handle diverse downstream applications. Across five mainstream tasks and four downstream tasks, evaluated on multiple generative backends, GEMS consistently achieves significant performance gains. Most notably, it enables the lightweight 6B model Z-Image-Turbo to surpass the state-of-the-art Nano Banana 2 on GenEval2, demonstrating the effectiveness of agent harness in extending model capabilities beyond their original limits.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: The system architecture of GEMS. The framework consists of three primary pillars: Agent Loop, Agent Memory, and Agent Skill. The user prompt is augmented with domain-specific expertise from Agent Skill, and then iteratively refined within the Agent Loop, with Agent Memory managing the historical context to guide the generation process.
Figure 3: Architecture of the Agent Skill system, highlighting its scalable and on-demand nature.
Model
Method
GenEval
GenEval2
DPG-Bench
OneIG-EN
OneIG-ZH
WISE
Avg.
Closed-Source Models
Nano Banana
–
0.75
44.6
85.23
0.550
0.405
–
–
GPT-Image 1
–
0.84
–
85.15
0.533
0.474
0.80
–
Seedream 4 [ 53 ]
–
0.84
–
88.25
0.576
0.553
0.78
–
Open-Source Models
Bagel [ 10 ]
–
0.82
23.1
85.10
0.361
0.370
0.70
59.35
Table 1: Evaluation on Mainstream Tasks. For inference-time scaling methods, all results are evaluated by us, with the best and second-best performances highlighted in bold and underlined , and relative improvements or decreases compared to the baseline indicated by ↑ and ↓ , respectively. Other results are sourced from public data. The “Avg." column represents the mean of normalized scores, with OneIG-EN and OneIG-ZH pre-averaged as a single metric before final aggregation.
Model
Method
LongText-EN
LongText-ZH
SpatialGenEval
CREA
ArtiMuse
Avg.
Closed-Source Models
Nano Banana
–
–
–
61.7
–
–
–
GPT-Image 1
–
0.956
0.619
60.5
–
–
–
Seedream 4 [ 53 ]
–
–
–
62.7
–
–
–
Open-Source Models
Bagel [ 10 ]
–
0.373
0.310
57.0
–
–
–
Table 2: Evaluation on Downstream Tasks. For inference-time scaling methods, all results are evaluated by us, with the best and second-best performances highlighted in bold and underlined , and relative improvements or decreases compared to the baseline indicated by ↑ and ↓ , respectively. Other results are sourced from public data. The “Avg.” column represents the mean of normalized scores, with LongText-EN and LongText-ZH pre-averaged as a single metric before final aggregation.
Figure 4: Ablation study on GenEval2 with Z-Image-Turbo. (Left) Performance gains contributed by individual components, including Agent Loop, Agent Memory, and Agent Skill. (Right) Detailed analysis of the performance improvements of Agent Memory.
Figure 5: Average passed criteria over iterations.
Figure 7
Figure 8: Iteration distribution across GEMS ablation variants. By incorporating Memory and Skill, the system shifts the distribution toward earlier rounds and reducing the average number of iterations.
Figure 9: Skill distribution across tasks and relative performance improvement. Each stacked bar illustrates the percentage composition of skills triggered within the respective benchmarks. The red numerical labels (e.g., +3.6%) above the bars denote the relative performance gain achieved compared to the version without Agent Skill.
Appendix figures & tables16 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 10: Prompt for Planner (Skill Selection).
Figure 11: Prompt for Planner (Skill Application).
Figure 12: Prompt for Decomposer.
Figure 13: Prompt for Verifier.
Figure 14: Prompt for Refiner.
Figure 15: Prompt for Compressor.
Base Model
Method
Single Obj
Two Obj
Counting
Colors
Position
Attr Binding
Overall
Closed-Source Models
Nano Banana
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
0.75
GPT-Image 1
–
0.99
0.92
0.85
0.92
0.75
0.61
0.84
Seedream 4 [ 53 ]
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
0.84
Open-Source Models
Bagel [ 10 ]
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
0.82
Appendix
Table 4: Detailed Performance Breakdown on GenEval. We report the fine-grained scores across six dimensions: Single Object, Two Object, Counting, Colors, Position, and Attribute Binding, with the overall performance shown in the last column.
Base Model
Method
Object
Attribute
Count
Position
Verb
Closed-Source Models
Nano Banana
–
99.0
91.4
70.1
70.2
86.7
Nano Banana 2
–
97.0
95.1
76.4
83.7
56.1
Open-Source Models
Bagel [ 10 ]
–
92.9
75.9
55.6
50.6
57.8
Qwen-Image [ 64 ]
–
99.1
85.6
70.3
60.2
71.1
Appendix
Table 5: Detailed Performance Breakdown on GenEval2. We report the fine-grained scores across five dimensions: Object, Attribute, Count, Position, and Verb.
Base Model
Method
Global
Entity
Attribute
Relation
Other
Overall
Closed-Source Models
Nano Banana
–
–
–
–
–
–
85.23
GPT-Image 1
–
88.89
88.94
89.84
92.63
90.96
85.15
Seedream 4 [ 53 ]
–
–
–
–
–
–
88.25
Open-Source Models
Bagel [ 10 ]
–
–
–
–
–
–
85.10
Appendix
Table 6: Detailed Performance Breakdown on DPG-Bench. We report the fine-grained scores across five dimensions: Global, Entity, Attribute, Relation, and Other, with the overall performance shown in the last column.
Base Model
Method
Alignment
Text
Reasoning
Style
Diversity
Overall
Closed-Source Models
Nano Banana
–
0.878
0.894
0.346
0.450
0.182
0.550
GPT-Image 1
–
0.851
0.857
0.345
0.462
0.151
0.533
Seedream 4 [ 53 ]
–
0.894
0.981
0.352
0.458
0.197
0.576
Open-Source Models
Bagel [ 10 ]
–
0.769
0.244
0.173
0.367
0.251
0.361
Appendix
Table 7: Detailed Performance Breakdown on OneIG-EN. We report the fine-grained scores across five dimensions: Alignment, Text, Reasoning, Style, and Diversity, with the overall performance shown in the last column.
Base Model
Method
Alignment
Text
Reasoning
Style
Diversity
Overall
Closed-Source Models
Nano Banana
–
0.825
0.276
0.298
0.427
0.198
0.405
GPT-Image 1
–
0.812
0.650
0.300
0.449
0.159
0.474
Seedream 4 [ 53 ]
–
0.847
0.982
0.286
0.443
0.206
0.553
Open-Source Models
Bagel [ 10 ]
–
0.672
0.365
0.186
0.357
0.268
0.370
Appendix
Table 8: Detailed Performance Breakdown on OneIG-ZH. We report the fine-grained scores across five dimensions: Alignment, Text, Reasoning, Style, and Diversity, with the overall performance shown in the last column.
Base Model
Method
Cultural
Time
Space
Biology
Physics
Chemistry
Overall
Closed-Source Models
GPT-Image 1
–
0.81
0.71
0.89
0.83
0.79
0.74
0.80
Seedream 4 [ 53 ]
–
0.78
0.73
0.85
0.79
0.84
0.67
0.78
Open-Source Models
Bagel [ 10 ]
–
0.76
0.69
0.75
0.65
0.75
0.58
0.70
Qwen-Image [ 64 ]
–
0.62
0.63
0.77
0.57
0.75
0.40
0.62
Appendix
Table 9: Detailed Performance Breakdown on WISE. We report the fine-grained scores across six dimensions: Cultural, Time, Space, Biology, Physics, and Chemistry, with the overall performance shown in the last column.
Base Model
Method
Object
Attribute
Position
Orientation
Layout
Comparison
Proximity
Occlusion
Motion
Causal
Overall
Closed-Source Models
Nano Banana
–
58.5
75.3
55.5
58.9
70.9
31.8
68.7
33.5
81.4
82.2
61.7
GPT-Image 1
–
56.3
74.1
53.3
58.9
70.4
31.4
66.8
30.2
80.9
82.2
60.5
Seedream 4 [ 53 ]
–
59.9
80.2
57.2
58.9
70.1
32.1
68.3
33.8
83.0
83.8
62.7
Open-Source Models
Bagel [ 10 ]
–
55.3
73.7
51.2
54.0
62.9
28.6
64.1
29.0
74.4
76.7
57.0
Appendix
Table 10: Detailed Performance Breakdown on SpatialGenEval. We report the fine-grained scores across ten dimensions: Object, Attribute, Position, Orientation, Layout, Comparison, Proximity, Occlusion, Motion, and Causal, with the overall performance shown in the last column.
Base Model
Method
Originality
Expressiveness
Aesthetic
Technical
Unexpected
Interpretability
Overall
Inference-Time Scaling
Z-Image-Turbo
Original
1.62
1.57
2.92
3.19
1.37
1.17
11.84
Rewrite
2.39
2.63
3.72
3.80
2.22
1.99
16.75
Promptist [ 17 ]
1.85
2.02
3.36
3.76
1.57
1.45
14.00
Search [ 41 ]
1.87
1.88
3.07
3.33
1.56
1.28
12.98
Maestro [ 59 ]
2.32
2.46
3.66
3.76
1.92
1.68
15.81
Appendix
Table 11: Detailed Performance Breakdown on CREA. We report the fine-grained scores across six dimensions: Originality, Expressiveness, Aesthetic, Technical, Unexpected, and Interpretability, with the overall performance shown in the last column.
Figure 16: Baseline vs GEMS for prompt: a view of the Earth from the moon.
Figure 17: Baseline vs GEMS for prompt: A high-speed photography shot of clear water being splashed upwards from a black surface. In mid-air, the splashing water droplets perfectly form the shape of a detailed, symmetrical butterfly. The wings are made entirely of liquid water ripples. The background is completely pitch black. The water butterfly is physically connected to the splash below.
Multimodal generation creates coordinated text, images, audio, video, 3D, and other outputs from mixed inputs while preserving meaning and consistency.
Image generation and editing models have advanced rapidly, yet remain unreliable when prompts require external world knowledge. Bounded and long-tail parametric knowledge prevents direct or reason-then-generate approaches from recovering the required facts and visual appearances. Existing agentic generation and editing methods mitigate this limitation with retrieval tools, yet remain constrained by insufficient visual verification, overloaded policy models, and weak integration of retrieved textual and visual evidence. To address these limitations, we present WeAgent-MMGenEdit, a full-stack recipe including a multimodal harness, a scalable data construction pipeline, a comprehensive benchmark, and post-training methods for the agent policy and image backend. We first introduce WeAgent-Harness, a multimodal runtime with persistent evidence management and dedicated verification and integration tools that organize retrieved multimodal evidence into a dense carrier. Upon this, we develop a scalable pipeline for prompt synthesis and agentic trajectory collection, yielding 23K supervised trajectories and 14.7K RL tasks with three-layer verifiable checklists. We further introduce WeBench-MMGenEdit, a bilingual benchmark covering both knowledge-intensive image generation and multi-image editing. Finally, a two-sided post-training recipe based on SFT and RL improves the agent policy and image backend. Together, WeAgent-MMGenEdit enables a 30B-total/3B-active policy to outperform similarly sized policy models and approach the performance of a 1T-parameter agent.
Skills are a promising way to improve LLM agent capabilities without retraining, while keeping the added procedure reusable and controllable. However, high-quality skills are still largely written by hand. We introduce SkillGen, a multi-agent framework that synthesizes a single auditable skill from trajectories generated by a base agent. The output is a human-readable artifact that can be inspected before use. Rather than merely summarizing trajectories, SkillGen leverages contrastive induction over both successful and failed trajectories to identify reusable success patterns, recurring failure modes, and behaviors that appear in nearby successes but are missing from failures. SkillGen then generates candidate skills and iteratively refines the skill. A key novelty in SkillGen is that we model agent skills as interventions to empirically verify the net effect of skills on the overall performance. Specifically, we compare outcomes on the same instances with and without the skill, so that we account for both repairs (cases where the skill fixes a baseline failure) and regressions (cases where the skill breaks a baseline success). Across a broad range of agents and datasets, SkillGen consistently improves held-out performance, outperforms existing skill-generation baselines, and produces skills that transfer across models.
Yuchen Ma, Yue Huang, Han Bao +5
Munich Center for Machine Learning, LMU Munich · University of Notre Dame · Microsoft Research
Agent skills, which consist of reusable strategies that guide agent reasoning and action, have shown strong potential for improving model capability at inference time. However, current skill construction methods treat the problem as one-shot extraction, overlooking a fundamental tension: a skill tailored to the specific task fails to transfer, while the abstracted skill often provides insufficient guidance. We attribute this fragility to the absence of explicit mechanisms for skill specification and generalization. To address this gap, we introduce SkillComposer, a framework that decomposes skill construction into three learnable operations: create, improve, and merge. Trained via systematic rejection sampling recipe, SkillComposer enables language models to self-evolve skills at inference time and supports three deployment modes: offline for building generalized libraries, online for task-specific refinement, and hybrid for combining both. Comprehensive experiments on τ2-Bench, LiveCodeBench v6, and AppWorld show that SkillComposer consistently outperforms baselines. Our SkillComposer-4B improves a 27B executor by up to +4.5 on agent tasks and +3.4 on code tasks, while generalizing across domains and task types unseen during training. Analysis reveals that merge and improve address orthogonal quality dimensions and that skill composition is a transferable meta-ability, providing a practical recipe for skill-augmented inference.
Qi Zhang, Zhaopeng Feng, Xiaonan Shi +8
1Zhejiang University · 2Tongyi Lab · 3National University of Singapore