Authors: Chenxi Xie, Yuhui Wu, Qiaosi Yi, Lei Zhang
Organizations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · OPPO Research Institute
Abstract
Existing image editing methods can be generally categorized into textual instruction-based and visual prompt-based ones. Textual instructions are semantically expressive, but are limited by the coarse granularity of spatial control of the editing results. In contrast, visual prompts such as drag and point can provide precise spatial guidance, but are limited by the inherent ambiguity in semantic intent. To unify the strength of textual and visual prompts, we present Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing, which jointly models textual instructions as semantic intent and sparse visual instructions as spatial guidance, aiming to achieve precise and intent-faithful image manipulation. To this end, we first construct a textual-visual instruction paired dataset with more than 23K samples derived from dynamic videos, enabling aligned supervision for cross-modal instruction. We then propose TV-Edit, a Textual-Visual instruction unified Editing framework to contextualize drag or point-based visual instructions with image-text semantics and lift them into semantic-aware control representations for pretrained editing backbones. By integrating semantic intent and spatial constraints, TV-Edit leads to more precise spatial control, less instruction ambiguity, and stronger structural consistency than text-only or drag-based alternatives. Finally, we establish TV-Edit-Bench, a deliberately designed benchmark to evaluate semantic faithfulness, spatial alignment, and visual consistency with ground-truth references and controlled textual-visual variations for reliable assessment. Our experiments across multiple editing backbones demonstrate that TV-Edit consistently yields more precise and intent-faithful edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art instruction-based and drag-based baselines.
Instruction-guided image editing has a training-time blind spot. Generative editors are never required to semantically verify whether their outputs actually satisfy the instruction. Supervision stops at reconstruction and input textual-level conditioning. This produces incomplete edits, spatial spillover, and poor localization. We present IABEdit, a model-agnostic framework that embeds differentiable semantic verification into training. A frozen vision-language model extracts spatially-aware descriptors from the ground-truth edit. A trainable aligner then reproduces them from the generated output. The residual between the two becomes a gradient that teaches the generator both what to edit and where, with no inference-time VLM cost. IABEdit is compatible with diverse backbones, including U-Net (Stable Diffusion) and MMDiT (FLUX), without altering their inference pipelines. On MagicBrush, it improves structural fidelity by +3.49 DINO-I over the best diffusion baseline and +1.26 over the best overall baseline, while remaining competitive on instruction alignment. It also achieves state-of-the-art instruction adherence performance on RealEdit and EMU Edit benchmarks based on embedding-based metrics. Most consequentially, on the D-LORD surveillance benchmark, it surpasses the proprietary Gemini agent by +5.13 DINO-P under heavy occlusion, where preserving identity is hardest. This shows that gradient-aligned VLM distillation holds up under real-world-like surveillance and occlusion conditions. Human and GPT-4o evaluations confirm perceptually precise, well-localized edits.
Text-driven instruction-based video editing in complex scenes remains challenging: purely textual prompts often fail to capture precise spatial relationships and physical constraints, resulting in target ambiguity and physically implausible outcomes. To address this, we propose a plan--guide--edit framework that explicitly bridges semantic intent and spatial execution. In our framework, a Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-enhanced multimodal large language model (MLLM) serves as a planner, performing structured reasoning over the video and instructions to derive a precise sequence of bounding boxes and attribute-enriched editing directives. These spatial priors then guide a box-conditioned mask generator, transforming ambiguous global retrieval into localized, context-aware refinement and producing masks that more accurately capture object scale, contact relationships, and placement. Building on these spatial and semantic signals, a diffusion-based editor integrates the masks, enriched instructions, and frame features to render high-fidelity edits that remain temporally coherent and spatially well aligned. Trained first in a modular manner and then jointly, our framework achieves superior performance with reduced data requirements, delivering precise localization in scenes with multiple similar objects and physically consistent object additions, and extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance over multiple strong baseline methods. More details are available at: https://github.com/flying-sky999/CoT-Edit
Text-guided image editing, a pivotal task in modern multimedia content creation, has seen remarkable progress with training-free methods that eliminate the need for additional optimization. Despite recent progress, existing methods are typically constrained by a competitive paradigm in which the editing and reconstruction branches are independently driven by their respective objectives to maximize alignment with target and source prompts. The adversarial strategy causes semantic conflicts and unpredictable outcomes due to the lack of coordination between branches. To overcome these issues, we propose Coopetitive Training-Free Image Editing (CoEdit), a novel zero-shot framework that transforms attention control from competition to coopetitive negotiation, achieving editing harmony across spatial and temporal dimensions. Spatially, CoEdit introduces Dual-Entropy Attention Manipulation, which quantifies directional entropic interactions between branches to reformulate attention control as a harmony-maximization problem, eventually improving the localization of editable and preservable regions. Temporally, we present Entropic Latent Refinement mechanism to dynamically adjust latent representations over time, minimizing accumulated editing errors and ensuring consistent semantic transitions throughout the denoising trajectory. Additionally, we propose the Fidelity-Constrained Editing Score, a composite metric that jointly evaluates semantic editing and background fidelity. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that CoEdit achieves superior performance in both editing quality and structural preservation, enhancing multimedia information utilization by enabling more effective interaction between visual and textual modalities. The code will be available at https://github.com/JinhaoShen/CoEdit.