Is This Edit Correct? A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Reasoning-Aware Image Editing
Authors: Yixuan Ding, Wei Huang, Ruijie Quan, Xiaojuan Qi, Yi Yang
Organizations: Zhejiang University · The University of Hong Kong
Abstract
Diffusion-based image editing has achieved strong visual fidelity under natural language instructions, yet most existing systems still operate at the level of surface instruction following, without reasoning about the implicit contextual constraints embedded in real user requests. This often leads to visually plausible but logically inconsistent edits. In this work, we introduce RE-Edit, a benchmark for REasoning-aware image Editing that evaluates image editing systems across five complementary reasoning dimensions: physical, environmental, cultural, causal, and referential. RE-Edit comprises 1,000 carefully curated samples, each designed such that visual plausibility alone is insufficient and correct editing requires satisfying implicit logical constraints. To support fine-grained analysis, we establish dimension-aligned evaluation criteria and conduct a comprehensive study of ten open-source and two commercial image editing models. Our results show that even advanced systems frequently struggle with implicit multi-dimensional reasoning despite producing high-quality visuals. We further present a lightweight reasoning-guided post-edit baseline as an initial exploration, illustrating how inserting explicit reasoning can help mitigate such failures in a model-agnostic manner.
Unified multimodal models target joint understanding, reasoning, and generation, but current image editing benchmarks are largely confined to natural images and shallow commonsense reasoning, offering limited assessment of this capability under structured, domain-specific constraints. In this work, we introduce GRADE, the first benchmark to assess discipline-informed knowledge and reasoning in image editing. GRADE comprises 520 carefully curated samples across 10 academic domains, spanning from natural science to social science. To support rigorous evaluation, we propose a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol that jointly assesses Discipline Reasoning, Visual Consistency, and Logical Readability. Extensive experiments on 20 state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source models reveal substantial limitations in current models under implicit, knowledge-intensive editing settings, leading to large performance gaps. Beyond quantitative scores, we conduct rigorous analyses and ablations to expose model shortcomings and identify the constraints within disciplinary editing. Together, GRADE pinpoints key directions for the future development of unified multimodal models, advancing the research on discipline-informed image editing and reasoning. Our benchmark and evaluation code are publicly released.
Recent text-guided image editing (TIE) models have achieved remarkable progress, however, many edited results still suffer from artifacts, unintended modifications, and suboptimal aesthetics. Although several benchmarks and evaluation methods have been proposed, most existing approaches rely on scalar scores and lack interpretability. This limitation largely stems from the absence of high-quality interpretation datasets for TIE and effective reward models to train interpretable evaluators. To address these challenges, we introduce ReasonEdit-22K, the first dataset that combines 22K edited images with 113K Chain-of-Thought (CoT) samples, along with 1.3M human judgments assessing these interpretations in terms of logicality, accuracy, and usefulness. Building upon this dataset, we propose RE-Reward, a multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based reward model designed to provide human-aligned feedback for evaluating interpretable reasoning in image editing. Furthermore, we develop ReasonEdit, which is trained using reward signals derived from RE-Reward and the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to learn an interpretable evaluation model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReasonEdit achieves superior alignment with human preferences and exhibits strong generalization across public benchmarks. In addition, it is capable of generating high-quality interpretable evaluation text, enabling more transparent and trustworthy assessment for image editing. The code is available at https://github.com/IntMeGroup/ReasonEdit.
Remote sensing image editing aims to modify remote sensing images according to natural language instructions while preserving geographic rules and sensor observation characteristics. Existing benchmarks mainly target natural images or general visual scenes, and thus may not fully capture the reasoning, regional control, and sensor-consistency abilities required in remote sensing editing. To fill this gap, we introduce RS-RIE-Bench, the first benchmark for reasoning-guided remote sensing image editing. RS-RIE-Bench organizes tasks into three categories: temporal reasoning, causal reasoning, and spatial reasoning. These categories capture temporal evolution, causal consequence, and spatial imaging consistency in remote sensing scenes. The evaluation protocol covers three dimensions: target region plausibility, non-target region preservation, and image quality consistency. We further demonstrate the feasibility of MLLM-based evaluation through cross-judge consistency analysis and stratified expert review. Systematic evaluation on eight open-source and closed-source image editing models shows that current models still have clear limitations in reasoning-guided remote sensing editing. Even the strongest model achieves only 24.28% overall accuracy under the strict joint-satisfaction criterion, while the mean relaxed joint-4 success rate across all eight models is 32.23%. Causal reasoning and spatial reasoning remain especially challenging, and several open-source models are close to zero in some categories. These results show that RS-RIE-Bench can effectively reveal the limitations of current models in geographic reasoning, regional control, and sensor-consistent generation. It also provides a standardized benchmark and a clear research direction for future remote sensing intelligent editing models.