Text-Guided Image Editing

We introduce Boogu-Image-0.1, an open-source unified multimodal understanding and generation model family, comprising Base, Turbo, Edit, and Edit-Turbo variants. It delivers competitive performance in high-quality text-to-image generation, fast inference, instruction-based editing, and bilingual (Chinese-English) text rendering. Closed-source multimodal systems like Nano-Banana-Pro and GPT-Image-2 achieve strong performance through system-level integration rather than a single model, yet their internal practices remain largely undisclosed. In this work, we demonstrate that targeted improvements in model understanding, data quality, and training pipelines, coupled with agentic inference-time scaling, can substantially enhance generation and editing performance even under highly constrained compute budgets. Comprehensive evaluations show that Boogu-Image-0.1 consistently matches or surpasses other open-source models across standard benchmarks, and achieves results approaching leading closed-source systems. Notably, this is accomplished with only 208.62 million unique images. The base model's theoretical training cost is only approximately $400K. We share practical discussions that we believe are valuable to the broader research community, and release weights, code, and recipes under Apache 2.0 to advance the open ecosystem for unified multimodal understanding and generation. Our code is available here: https://github.com/Boogu-Project/Boogu-Image.

Despite remarkable progress in text-guided image editing, generative models frequently fail to preserve visual object consistency, defined as the preservation of a subject's key attributes throughout the editing process. We address this limitation through three contributions. First, we introduce ABO-Edit, a dataset specifically designed to study object consistency, comprising over 12,000 triplets of source images, editing prompts, and high-quality target images rendered from artist-designed 3D assets, with multi-view coverage and human-verified quality control. Second, we uncover an overlooked property of image-editing rectified flow models: the conditioning embedding space, not directly supervised during training, encodes a prediction of the final generated image even at high noise levels. Third, exploiting this finding, we propose FlowMirror, a parameter-free auxiliary loss that supervises this conditioning embedding space. Without architectural changes, our method improves generation quality across several metrics over baselines.

Editing images with pre-trained text-to-image flow models typically requires carefully balancing target alignment with the desired prompt and source consistency with the original image. Existing approaches either rely on inversion-based pipelines or heuristic source-to-target trajectory constructions, which often depend on architecture-specific designs or are sensitive to hyperparameters. In this paper, we propose h-Flow, a training-free and theoretically grounded flow-based editing framework. Inspired by Doob's $h$-Transform, we reformulate image editing as conditional generation under multiple terminal events corresponding to source consistency and target alignment. We first extend the classical $h$-Transform from SDE-based models to the deterministic RF framework by constructing an equivalent SDE with identical marginals. Within this formulation, we design dedicated $h$-functions for source consistency and target alignment, yielding closed-form reconstruction guidance and velocity-based semantic editing signals. We further introduce a velocity orthogonal decomposition to decouple reconstruction and editing directions, enabling a controllable trade-off between the two objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that h-Flow achieves effective, robust, and flexible editing across diverse scenarios. The code will be released soon.

Photorealistic Style Transfer (PST) aims to transfer the color and tonal style of a reference to a content image while strictly preserving its structural integrity. However, existing deep learning-based methods inherently suffer from semantic entanglement caused by pre-trained image encoders, leading to unnatural spatial distortions. Moreover, current pixel-level mapping paradigms often ignore color gamut topology, resulting in color banding, while also lacking the multimodal capability for intuitive text-driven control. To address these bottlenecks, we propose StatLUT, an innovative multimodal framework for 3D LUT generation. First, we bypass traditional encoders and introduce a Lab-Extractor to derive spatially-agnostic statistical features, fundamentally decoupling color distributions from structural semantics to ensure artifact-free rendering. Second, we formulate LUT generation as a Transformer-based Seq2Seq translation task, utilizing a Multi-dimensional Residual Mapper (MR-Mapper) to predict topologically smooth 3D LUTs. Finally, to break the single-modal barrier, we propose the H-Diffuser, a lightweight Diffusion Transformer that directly synthesizes statistical features from natural language prompts, enabling flexible text-driven color grading. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that StatLUT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both visual quality and quantitative metrics, pioneering a highly robust and flexible paradigm for multimodal photorealistic style transfer.

Large-vocabulary instance segmentation is constrained by long-tailed category distributions and fine-grained inter-class ambiguity. While data synthesis offers a promising alternative, current paradigms have complementary limitations: text-to-image (T2I) methods inherit noisy pseudo-labels and struggle on rare classes, whereas copy-paste methods compromise contextual realism. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid pipeline coupling T2I generation with context-aware image-to-image (I2I) editing. The T2I branch provides broad category and scene diversity, while a teacher-student scheme ensures label reliability by selectively retaining only prompt-specified categories. To strengthen supervision for rare classes, we introduce VRAIN (Verified Rare-class Augmentation via INstructed editing), a novel I2I editor. VRAIN inserts high-confidence instances at semantically appropriate locations within in-the-wild scenes, yielding semantically coherent and visually natural edits that reduce domain gaps and enable targeted augmentation. On the LVIS benchmark, our method surpasses existing baselines, improving overall AP by up to +4.0 points and rare-class AP by up to +9.5 points, while scaling effectively with backbone capacity. Our project page is available at https://seokhunchoi.github.io/TMI

Complex image creation and editing often require more than a single generation or editing model. A user request may involve synthesizing images, localizing objects, segmenting regions, editing selected content, compositing intermediate assets, reading text, and enhancing the final result. Such tasks shift multimodal agents from perception-augmented reasoning to manipulation-centered visual creation, where tools must actively transform visual states rather than merely inspect them. However, existing multimodal tool-use agents are mostly optimized for perception, search, or domain-specific editing, and lack large-scale supervision for executable image-creation trajectories. In this paper, we introduce CanvasCraft, a large-scale multimodal tool-use dataset for complex image creation and editing, and \textbf{CanvasAgent}, a tool-augmented multimodal agent that learns to orchestrate heterogeneous visual tools through multi-turn interaction. CanvasCraft contains 140K fully annotated executable trajectories and 10K RL task specifications. CanvasAgent is first trained with SFT to learn executable reasoning-action trajectories, and is then optimized with GRPO using a hybrid reward that combines outcome- and process-level signals. During rollout, CanvasAgent inspects intermediate results, tracks visual assets, and adapts tool decisions to the evolving visual state. Experiments evaluate both final image quality and trajectory behavior, demonstrating the effectiveness of CanvasAgent and the proposed dataset for complex multi-tool image creation workflows.

Graphic design editing requires precise manipulation of typography, layout, and visual hierarchy under strict design constraints. Following the introduction of large language models, organizations have increasingly promoted vision-language models to enhance productivity. However, current models operate on pixels and achieve only 52% constraint satisfaction on structured design edits, thereby limiting their reliability for professional workflows. We present StructuredEdit, a pipeline that reframes design editing as parameter manipulation rather than pixel generation. Our core technical contribution is Differentiable Parameter Propagation (DPP), a training method that embeds hard design constraints into vision-language model fine-tuning by backpropagating pixel-level constraint violations through a lightweight differentiable rasterizer. A hybrid candidate-and-filter pipeline produces 125k validated edit triplets. The resulting system reaches 89% constraint satisfaction versus 52% for GPT-4V, 0.82 matched-element Intersection over Union, and 76% top-1 font accuracy over the 100 most-frequent design typefaces. In a user study (N=35), editing time drops 33% and correction iterations drop 44% relative to a GPT-4V baseline.

Text-guided image editing aims to modify visual content according to a target prompt while preserving the background. Recent inversion-free image editing frameworks such as FlowEdit have demonstrated strong editing capability without requiring inversion. Empirically, FlowEdit can achieve substantial semantic changes under appropriate hyperparameter settings. However, we observe that under certain global attribute shifts, the editing trajectory may not effectively move away from the source distribution in the early timesteps. Our analysis suggests that in the high-noise regime, the dominant manifold-seeking flow toward the data manifold can reduce the influence of the text-conditioned direction, leading to limited global modification while background structures remain only moderately preserved. Inspired by this observation, we propose an inversion-free, frequency-aware semantic compensation strategy that strengthens the effective signal in the early stage of generation, while maintaining structural consistency in the background. The proposed method improves global editing capacity without sacrificing background fidelity.

Real-world e-commerce image editing often requires multiple, localized, and auditable operations rather than global restyling. This compositional nature poses a dual challenge: models must precisely apply all requested edits to the correct regions while preserving unmodified content, even under ambiguous instructions. Existing one-shot editors conflate intent resolution, spatial grounding, and synthesis into a single step, frequently resulting in partial execution failures, which is unacceptable for commercial scenarios. To address this, we introduce GMO-E$^2$DIT, an agentic editing framework that couples a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with a mask-conditioned image editor to tackle structured multi-turn task completion. Given an underspecified instruction, the VLM agent constructs a region-grounded edit agenda, effectively decoupling cognitive reasoning from generative rendering. The framework then executes sub-programs via operation-aware masks and references, utilizing a reflection-driven loop to inspect intermediate results and determine the subsequent state. This iterative mechanism reliably preserves safe partial progress, retries unfinished operations, and recovers from errors. Furthermore, we develop a unified data pipeline providing aligned supervision for planning, execution, and reflection, alongside EComEditBench, a comprehensive benchmark for instruction-driven evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GMO-E$^2$DIT achieves competitive performance compared to strong closed-source models, yielding superior instruction accuracy and edit fidelity over existing baselines.

Editing multiple elements of an image in a single forward pass is a practical alternative to multi-turn image manipulation, offering improved efficiency and potentially better harmonization. However, when several instructions target different regions, semantic interference often leads to attribute leakage and poor edit disentanglement, especially as the number of edits increases. In this work, we propose MICE (Multi-Instance Concurrent Editing), a training-free strategy for scalable multi-instance image editing with Multimodal Diffusion Transformers. MICE modifies the additive bias of joint attention to regulate interactions between instance-specific edit instructions, latent, and context tokens identified via user-provided segmentation masks. Specifically, MICE allows intra-instance attention, penalizes interactions between neighboring region tokens, and suppresses unrelated cross-instance attention. As a result, our method enforces attribute binding while preserving global visual consistency. We evaluate MICE on LoMOE-Bench and introduce MICE-Bench, a more challenging benchmark with an average of 8.5 concurrent edits per image. The experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baselines and recent competitors in terms of visual quality preservation and faithfulness to the editing instructions.

The demand for image manipulation has seen a significant increase recently. Traditional tools like Photoshop and Capture One, while powerful, require considerable expertise to use effectively. Generative AI has introduced alternative platforms, such as Luminar Neo, Pixlr X, and Canva. However, many of these solutions, including resource-heavy models like Stable Diffusion, often require substantial retraining and fine-tuning, leading to high costs for users. To address these challenges, we introduce Efficient Photo Editor (EPEdit), an application that integrates a robust backend framework with a user-friendly front-end interface. EPEdit supports a wide range of creative image editing tasks, including image generation, object replacement, object removal, background modification, changes in object pose or perspective, region-specific editing, and thematic collection design, all guided by masks and prompts. Users can interact with the system through simple text commands or by marking areas for precise adjustments, making it accessible even to those without technical expertise. At its core, EPEdit leverages zero-shot image editing algorithms based on Stable Diffusion model, removing the need for additional fine-tuning. This approach enables efficient image manipulation and thematic collection creation. User evaluations for tasks of image editing, thematic design, and overall system performance demonstrate that EPEdit outperforms existing solutions, offering a user-friendly, cost-effective solution for comprehensive image editing.

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

Real image editing enables precise manipulation of visual content, yet existing methods often fail in complex multi-object scenarios, causing semantic blending, object duplication, or incomplete edits. We attribute these failures to attention leakage, where signals across spatial regions and text tokens become entangled during the denoising process. Specifically, we identify two distinct forms of leakage: Edit-Token Leakage, where ambiguous token-region alignment leads to object blending, and Source Dominance Leakage, where tokens of unchanged source objects overwhelm the attention intended for target entities. To resolve these leakages, we propose \textbf{BindEdit}, which enforces attention-level constraints within a single diffusion trajectory. To suppress Edit-Token Leakage, BindEdit jointly regularizes cross- and self-attention so that each target token group is bound to its corresponding spatial region while maintaining instance-level separation. To suppress Source Dominance Leakage, a cross-attention re-balancing mechanism amplifies target token influence and attenuates residual source semantics within editable regions. Moreover, a region fidelity term ensures that each target concept is expressed coherently across the entire editing mask. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive multi-object benchmark encompassing diverse object counts and categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BindEdit consistently outperforms existing methods within a single diffusion trajectory, maintaining robust performance across both single- and multi-object editing scenarios.

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.

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

A key challenge in multimodal reasoning is determining which visual dependencies become relevant under a specific task, rather than merely recognizing visible content. We study this through edit-induced constraint discovery in text-in-image editing, a controlled diagnostic setting where a local text change can activate secondary consistency constraints: given a valid editing instruction and an image, can a model identify the secondary regions that must also change? Across 461 diagnostic cases, four MLLMs, and 19 constraint subtypes, models recover only 46% case-level macro recall under unguided prompting versus 94% when constraints are explicitly provided, suggesting that a substantial portion of the failure arises when models must decide which unstated dependencies to surface. Oracle-field decomposition shows that case-specific causal explanations are the most effective partial guidance (0.782 recall), above region names (0.610) or type labels (0.646), suggesting that edit-specific causal cues account for much of the oracle gain. A downstream experiment further shows that higher self-discovery recall does not necessarily improve task performance: unverified self-discovery introduces false positives that offset recall gains, motivating precision-aware constraint elicitation.

In recent years, there have been notable advancements in the area of instruction-based image editing (IIE), which focuses on the automatic alteration of input images using a model. Nevertheless, assessing the effectiveness of these editing models poses a considerable challenge due to the intricate nature of instructions and the wide variety of edits. To tackle this problem, one urgent task in this domain is the development of a robust evaluation framework that can precisely gauge the quality of editing outcomes and offer valuable benchmarks to guide future improvements. To address this challenge, we present a comprehensive evaluation benchmark named I2EBench2.0, designed for single-round and multi-round assessment of IIE models. I2EBench2.0 has four key features: 1) Evaluation Across Single and Multi-rounds: I2EBench2.0 simultaneously evaluates both single-round and multi-round instruction-based edits, assessing the precision and consistency of the edits. 2) Extensive Evaluation Criteria: I2EBench2.0 encompasses a broad range of criteria, evaluating both high-level and low-level aspects of each IIE model. Specifically, it incorporates 16 dimensions for single-round evaluations and 7 for multi-round evaluations. 3) Alignment with Human Judgment: To ensure our benchmark aligns with human evaluation, we conducted a comprehensive user study for each criterion. 4) Research-driven Insights: By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of current IIE models across all 16 single-round and 7 multi-round dimensions, we provide critical insights aimed at directing future research in this area. We tested eight recently developed IIE models using I2EBench2.0 and derived academic insights through meticulous comparison and analysis. The related code, dataset, and images generated by all IIE models are available on GitHub: https://github.com/cocoshe/I2EBench.

Inversion-based image editing offers flexible and training-free control but still struggles with inversion accuracy and the trade-off between editing fidelity and background preservation. While recent methods improve inversion formulations or attention interactions, the role of textual conditioning in shaping diffusion dynamics and editing behavior remains underexplored. We show both empirically and theoretically that the precision of textual conditioning influences inversion stability by modulating the geometry of the diffusion velocity field, while also affecting the consistency of cross-branch attention during editing. These effects directly impact background preservation and semantic fidelity. Building on this analysis, we propose SimEdit, a conditioning-aware framework with two complementary components: (a) conditioning refinement, which constructs conditioning signals with improved semantic precision and structural alignment to facilitate stable inversion and consistent attention manipulation, and (b) token-wise cross-branch attention control, which separates edit-relevant and structure-preserving components and modulates them asymmetrically during attention manipulation. Extensive experiments on PIE-Bench demonstrate that SimEdit consistently improves both inversion reconstruction quality and editing performance over previous attention-manipulation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/SimEdit.

One-step image editing is important for making text-guided editing fast, practical, and easy to deploy, but its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. We revisit ChordEdit through reproduction, ablation, and simplification. Our analysis shows that a) the chord window $δ$ largely acts as an effective timestep shift from $t$ to $t - δ$; b) chord transport acts on high-noise images and mainly performs low-frequency semantic editing; and c) proximal alignment acts on low-noise images and complements it by adding high-frequency target details. In this view, ChordEdit naturally decomposes editing into a coarse low-frequency transport stage and a fine high-frequency alignment stage. These findings suggest a path toward prompt-conditioned dynamic timestep selection for adaptive image editing. All code and results can be found at link.

Zero-shot text-guided diffusion has significantly advanced image editing; however, its practical usability remains constrained by three persistent challenges: prompt brittleness that requires meticulous prompt engineering, spillover edits that unintentionally affect non-target regions, and failures on small or cluttered objects caused by limited fine-grained supervision in training data. We propose FocusDiff (Target-Aware Refocusing for Tuning-Free Diffusion Editing), a tuning-free framework for precise and region-specific image manipulation based on refocusing cross-attention. Given a target region obtained through automated segmentation or manual selection, FocusDiff applies selective blurring to non-edit areas to guide attention toward the masked region while accurately transferring the object's identity, structure, and appearance to the edited output. Integrated context-preserving modules further ensure background fidelity and global coherence, enabling accurate edits from simple text prompts in a single pass. We also extend FocusDiff to 360-degree indoor panorama editing and demonstrate its effectiveness within virtual reality environments. Extensive experiments on our localized editing benchmark LIMB, comprising 30 multi-object images and 100 annotated examples including challenging small-object cases, show that FocusDiff outperforms existing zero-shot editors in text-image alignment and background preservation, achieving superior precision, photorealism, and usability. The project page is available at https://vdkhoi20.github.io/FocusDiff.

Text-guided image editing with visual autoregressive (VAR) generators requires controlling both what the model samples and where the sampled change is written back into the image code. Existing VAR editors mainly operate on token streams, features, or flat next-token logits, leaving two native structures of bitwise-residual VAR models underused: the per-bit Bernoulli prediction head and the additive multi-scale residual code field from which the image is assembled. We propose BitResEdit, a training-free editor for bitwise-residual VAR generators such as Infinity. BitEdit performs source-negative guidance by tilting the post-CFG per-bit log-odds along a source--target contrast computed on a shared edited prefix, then projects each update into a closed-form Bernoulli-KL trust region around the clean CFG sampler. ResEdit converts the sampled bits into per-scale continuous-code residuals, gates them with a localization mask, and re-injects them through the generator's native sum-of-scales. Together they couple decision-time bit guidance with combination-time code composition, so masked-out latent features are preserved exactly by code arithmetic while localized, scale-aware edits are applied inside the target region. On PIE-Bench with Infinity-2B, BitResEdit attains the strongest text alignment among same-backbone VAR editors, improving CLIP on the edited region by +1.07 over the strongest prior editor while keeping background preservation competitive with it. Ablations show BitEdit and ResEdit play complementary roles in target alignment and background preservation.

Recent diffusion editors perform diverse instruction-based edits while conditioning on the source image at every denoising step. Yet persistent source-image conditioning can limit how fully an edit is executed and how natural the result appears, especially when the target scene diverges substantially from the input. We introduce DuET (Dual Expert Trajectories), a training-free inference method that temporarily relaxes source-image conditioning by transitioning through a text-to-image phase before returning to edit mode, allowing the denoising trajectory to move toward the target distribution while retaining the structural benefits of image-conditioned editing. Without modifying model weights or increasing sampling cost, DuET consistently improves instruction relevance, semantic fidelity, and perceptual quality across diverse models and benchmarks. In some cases, these gains come with a modest reduction in source-image preservation, revealing a predictable trade-off between source preservation and edit fidelity.

This paper introduces ARM, a discrete representation-based AutoRegressive Model that unifies image understanding, generation, and editing within a next-token prediction framework. ARM is built on three efforts: first, we train a discrete semantic visual tokenizer that maps images into compact token sequences. Our tokenizer is supervised with multiple objectives that jointly promote semantic discriminability, language alignment and faithful reconstruction, thereby supporting diverse tasks in a shared latent space. With this, we train a 7B autoregressive model over large-scale text and image token sequences, seamlessly developing vision-language perception and generation capabilities. Finally, to further improve preference-aligned behavior for text-to-image generation and instruction-guided editing, ARM applies reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize task-level objectives such as visual quality, instruction adherence, and edit consistency. Surprisingly, the results show that RL not only substantially improves performance on the target tasks (e.g., raising WISE overall from 0.50 to 0.56, GEdit-Bench-EN G_O from 5.75 to 6.68), but also induces cross-task synergy between text-to-image generation and editing. Collectively, these findings highlight autoregressive modeling, when paired with strong representations and preference optimization, as a scalable foundation for multimodal intelligence. Code: https://github.com/wdrink/ARM.

Current image editing software often hinges on fixed filters or expert tuning, leaving a gap between amateur users' intent and outcomes. Creations by generative models may contain artifacts, implausible details, or stylistic drift away from photorealism and offer little insight into why an edit was made. We propose IEA, a conversational Image Editing Agent that learns to operate parameterized tools in an explicit, interpretable action space. IEA is trained via a three-stage multitask pipeline: (1) SFT on distilled expert edits, (2) GRPO with rewards for likeness improvement, tool usefulness, and intent summarization, and (3) large-scale synthetic fine-tuning to jointly master image editing, refinement, and user intent summarization. By manipulating 16 editing tools step by step, IEA produces transparent edit traces that can be inspected and debugged. In quantitative experiments, it attains a lower pixel distance on the edit task and a higher ROUGE-L on the summary task than strong baselines. In user studies, it ranks best among tool-calling methods for instruction following while surpassing generative methods in overall perceptual quality. Our results validate interpretable, tool-centric VLMs as a reliable path to human instruction-guided image retouching.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable flexible instruction-driven image editing, but privacy risks arise when user images expose diverse and user-specific private content. Canonical privacy protection strategies typically substitute sensitive regions with surrogate content before cloud editing. Yet, the resulting output is often an edited surrogate rather than the desired edited source image, neglecting the local recovery in both design and evaluation scope. To this end, we introduce SPPE (Surrogate-based Privacy-Preserving Editing), the first recovery-oriented benchmark covering 36 fine-grained privacy categories and 65 editing instructions. It defines two complementary tasks: 1) editability assessment, which estimates before cloud interaction whether a surrogate can induce an edit consistent with the original image; and 2) surrogate-to-source edit recovery, which evaluates whether the edited surrogate can be transferred back to the private source with the edit effect preserved. We address each task with a dedicated method: ERMA predicts surrogate editability through instruction-aware multimodal relation modeling, while \method performs cycle-consistent recovery by using the surrogate editing pair as visual edit evidence and the source image as a source-preserving anchor. Experiments on SPPE and InstructPix2Pix show consistent improvements on both tasks. For editability assessment, ERMA improves over the best-performing baselines by 13.9% in SRCC and 12.3% in PLCC. For surrogate-to-source edit recovery, C2E-S2SER outperforms SOER across all 8 source integrity and edit consistency metrics on SPPE.

We propose TextWand, a general-purpose framework that unifies scene text removal, generation, and replacement into a single model. By decomposing complex editing tasks into the atomic primitives of rendering and erasure, TextWand achieves precise control over both text appearance and background integrity. Specifically, we introduce a novel design, Overlay-Reference Positional Encoding (ORPE), to enforce pixel-level layout fidelity and exemplar-driven style control, alongside a new strategy, Region-Adaptive Suppression (RAS), to ensure clean text erasure. To address the absence of a comprehensive benchmark for general-purpose scene text editing among existing single-task datasets, we construct TextWand-Bench. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TextWand outperforms existing leading open-source and closed-source models by delivering superior text content accuracy, layout and style consistency, and overall image quality across scene text removal, generation and replacement tasks.

Language-guided photo retouching aims to adjust color and tone while preserving geometry and texture. Recently, diffusion-based retouching shows a superior visual quality, but often struggles with both fidelity issues due to its generative nature and efficiency because of its iterative sampling process. In this work, we propose an efficient and fidelity-preserving retouching method using bilateral space manipulation, which is both compact and content-decoupled. Specifically, instead of directly editing pixels or image latents, our model predicts a low-resolution bilateral grid of affine transforms, which are sliced using a learned guidance map and then applied to the full-resolution image. This approach yields both high fidelity and improved efficiency. To retain strong priors of a pretrained generative model, we distill a multi-step diffusion model into our bilateral grid framework using Variational Score Distillation, complemented by a prompt alignment loss to guide instruction-following behavior. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark and evaluate our method across multiple dimensions: fidelity, instruction following, and efficiency. Compared to the latest retouch methods, like Gemini-2.5-Flash (Nano-Banana), our method can avoid content drift, significantly improve latency, and generate visually pleasing edits, while maintaining a high level of fidelity. Project page: https://openimaginglab.github.io/InstantRetouch/.

In this work, we introduce a novel training-free inversion (TFinv) framework for one-step diffusion models,addressing key challenges in real image inversion and editing. We first identify two critical factors hamperingreal-image inversion and editing: (1) Initial Latent Editability, which is related to the distance between theinitial noise and the ideal Gaussian distribution, and (2) Caption Gap, which means the alignment betweentext captions and image representations. Both factors influence inversion efficiency and the editability ofone-step diffusion models. Then, we propose two novel techniques: iterative noise alignment (iterNA), whichminimizes the distribution gap to align with the normal Gaussian distribution, and suffix learning (suffL),which enhances text-to-image caption alignment by introducing learned suffix prompt tokens. These techniquesenable precise inversion of input images into their initial noise representations and facilitate image editing.Furthermore, we propose a mask-based editing technique for localized edits while preserving backgroundintegrity. Comprehensive experiments on the PIE-Bench dataset validate that our method TFinv not onlyachieves state-of-the-art performance in one-step diffusion editing, but also significantly outperforms existingmultistep approaches in efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/tttao-uwu/TFinv.git.

Despite tremendous recent progress, current text-guided image editing methods still struggle with many aspects of editing involving instruction following, minimally editing the source image, and ensuring high visual quality. These problems are especially apparent when the requested edit is challenging, such as those that involve position, motion, viewpoint, scale and creative edits. To systematically test generative image editors, we propose a novel image editing benchmark -- TECCI: Tricky Edits of Collected and Curated Images. TECCI consists of a completely new set of images we are releasing. The images in TECCI span 7 image categories. The images and these categories were curated intentionally to target weaknesses of existing methods. The edit instructions in TECCI are automatically generated by Gemini, covering 5 edit types per source image. We also curated a set of 530 images for which we created challenging manually written edit instructions. Overall, TECCI contains 7550 pairs of images and edit instructions. We conduct human evaluations of five leading image editing models on TECCI. Humans judge outputs along three dimensions: 1) instruction following, 2) minimality of the edits, and 3) visual quality. To scale-up the evaluation, we also build an auto-rater using Gemini that achieves 74.7% accuracy in matching human evaluations. Our evaluations reveal that: 1) none of the models exceed a 22% overall success rate, demonstrating the challenging nature of TECCI, 2) Nano Banana Pro is the best performing model overall, 3) models perform significantly better at instruction following compared to minimal edits and visual quality, 4) models struggle with editing architecture and nature images which require strong understanding of spatial layout and intricate visual details. 5) reasoning and creative edits are the most difficult, whereas color and appearance edits are the easiest.

Instruction-guided image editing is becoming a general interface for visual work, yet existing benchmarks still focus largely on narrow appearance edits and do not fully capture the diversity of real-image tasks in professional workflows. Here, we define instructional computer vision problem solving as a broader formulation of image editing: given a real input image and a natural-language instruction, a system must produce an edited output that realizes the requested transformation while satisfying explicit preservation, geometric, physical, and usability constraints. We introduce CV-Arena, an open benchmark designed to evaluate this capability at professional scales. CV-Arena contains 12K high-resolution real-image instruction pairs spanning 16 instruction-based visual task types, constructed using CogRetriever, a dual-track retrieval-and-curation pipeline that combines targeted web search, agentic query refinement, verification, and traceability. To evaluate models at scale while preserving human fidelity, we propose Active Elo, a human-AI collaborative preference protocol that leverages CV-Judge, a logic-gated, multi-dimensional VLM evaluator, to reject clear failures and resolve high-confidence comparisons; and to route close, high-quality comparisons to expert raters. Mixed human and AI supervision is then aggregated through reliability-weighted Elo updates. Our comprehensive evaluation of 21 systems, including proprietary, open-source, and agentic models, on CV-Arena reveals persistent gaps in instruction adherence, physical reasoning, structural control, and fine-grained detail preservation. We further develop CV-Agent, a lightweight agentic model that combines planning, editing, and verification, and demonstrate that closed-loop reasoning is a promising direction for professional-grade instruction-following visual editing.