Text-Guided Image Editing

Existing image editing methods struggle to perceive where to edit, especially under complex scenes and nuanced spatial instructions. To address this issue, we propose Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought (GVCoT), a unified framework that performs native visual reasoning by first generating spatial cues to localize the target region and then executing the edit. Unlike prior text-only CoT or tool-dependent visual CoT paradigms, GVCoT jointly optimizes visual tokens generated during the reasoning and editing phases in an end-to-end manner. This way fosters the emergence of innate spatial reasoning ability and enables more effective utilization of visual-domain cues. The main challenge of training GCVoT lies in the scarcity of large-scale editing data with precise edit region annotations; to this end, we construct GVCoT-Edit-Instruct, a dataset of 1.8M high-quality samples spanning 19 tasks. We adopt a progressive training strategy: supervised fine-tuning to build foundational localization ability in reasoning trace before final editing, followed by reinforcement learning to further improve reasoning and editing quality. Finally, we introduce SREdit-Bench, a new benchmark designed to comprehensively stress-test models under sophisticated scenes and fine-grained referring expressions. Experiments demonstrate that GVCoT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models on SREdit-Bench and ImgEdit. We hope our GVCoT will inspire future research toward interpretable and precise image editing.

Emerging unified editing models have demonstrated strong capabilities in general object editing tasks. However, it remains a significant challenge to perform fine-grained editing in complex multi-entity scenes, particularly those where targets are not visually salient and require spatial reasoning. To this end, we propose InterCoG, a novel text-vision Interleaved Chain-of-Grounding reasoning framework for fine-grained image editing in complex real-world scenes. The key insight of InterCoG is to first perform object position reasoning solely within text that includes spatial relation details to explicitly deduce the location and identity of the edited target. It then conducts visual grounding via highlighting the editing targets with generated bounding boxes and masks in pixel space, and finally rewrites the editing description to specify the intended outcomes. To further facilitate this paradigm, we propose two auxiliary training modules: multimodal grounding reconstruction supervision and multimodal grounding reasoning alignment to enforce spatial localization accuracy and reasoning interpretability, respectively. We also construct GroundEdit-45K, a dataset comprising 45K grounding-oriented editing samples with detailed reasoning annotations, and GroundEdit-Bench for grounding-aware editing evaluation. Extensive experiments substantiate the superiority of our approach in highly precise edits under spatially intricate and multi-entity scenes.

Significant progress has been made in the field of Instruction-based Image Editing Models (IIEMs). However, while these models demonstrate plausible adherence to instructions and strong reasoning ability on current benchmarks, their ability to edit small objects remains underexplored, despite its importance for precise local editing and refining details in both real and generated images. In this paper, we introduce DeepLookEditBench (DLEBench), the first benchmark dedicated to assessing the abilities of IIEMs in editing small-scale objects. Specifically, we construct a challenging testbed comprising 1889 samples across seven instruction types. In these samples, target objects occupy only 1%-10% of the image area, covering complex scenarios such as partial occlusion and multi-object editing. To ensure robust evaluation on this benchmark, we propose an evaluation protocol with refined score rubrics to minimize subjectivity and ambiguity in two criteria: Instruction Following and Visual Consistency. This protocol also introduces a dual-mode evaluation framework (Tool-driven and Oracle-guided Modes) addressing the misalignment between LMM-as-a-Judge and human judgements on DLEBench. Empirical results on 10 IIEMs reveal significant performance gaps in small-scale object editing, highlighting the need for specialized benchmarks to advance this ability.

With the recent fast development of generative models, instruction-based image editing has shown great potential in generating high-quality images. However, the quality of editing highly depends on carefully designed instructions, placing the burden of task decomposition and sequencing entirely on the user. To achieve autonomous image editing, we present PhotoAgent, a system that advances image editing through explicit aesthetic planning. Specifically, PhotoAgent formulates autonomous image editing as a long-horizon decision-making problem. It reasons over user aesthetic intent, plans multi-step editing actions via tree search, and iteratively refines results through closed-loop execution with memory and visual feedback, without requiring step-by-step user prompts. To support reliable evaluation in real-world scenarios, we introduce UGC-Edit, an aesthetic evaluation benchmark consisting of 7,000 photos and a learned aesthetic reward model. We also construct a test set containing 1,017 photos to systematically assess autonomous photo editing performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhotoAgent consistently improves both instruction adherence and visual quality compared with baseline methods. The project page is https://mdyao.github.io/PhotoAgent/.

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.

Instruction-based image editing has achieved remarkable success in semantic alignment, yet state-of-the-art models frequently fail to render physically plausible results when editing involves complex causal dynamics, such as refraction or material deformation. We attribute this limitation to the dominant paradigm that treats editing as a discrete mapping between image pairs, which provides only boundary conditions and leaves transition dynamics underspecified. To address this, we reformulate physics-aware editing as predictive physical state transitions and introduce PhysicTran38K, a large-scale video-based dataset comprising 38K transition trajectories across five physical domains, constructed via a two-stage filtering and constraint-aware annotation pipeline. Building on this supervision, we propose PhysicEdit, an end-to-end framework equipped with a textual-visual dual-thinking mechanism. It combines a frozen Qwen2.5-VL for physically grounded reasoning with learnable transition queries that provide timestep-adaptive visual guidance to a diffusion backbone. Experiments show that PhysicEdit improves over Qwen-Image-Edit by 5.9% in physical realism and 10.1% in knowledge-grounded editing, setting a new state-of-the-art for open-source methods, while remaining competitive with leading proprietary models.

Image Chain-of-Thought (Image-CoT) is a test-time scaling paradigm that improves image generation by extending inference time. Most Image-CoT methods focus on text-to-image (T2I) generation. Unlike T2I generation, image editing is goal-directed: the solution space is constrained by the source image and instruction. This mismatch causes three challenges when applying Image-CoT to editing: inefficient resource allocation with fixed sampling budgets, unreliable early-stage verification using general MLLM scores, and redundant edited results from large-scale sampling. To address this, we propose ADaptive Edit-CoT (ADE-CoT), an on-demand test-time scaling framework to enhance editing efficiency and performance. It incorporates three key strategies: (1) a difficulty-aware resource allocation that assigns dynamic budgets based on estimated edit difficulty; (2) edit-specific verification in early pruning that uses region localization and caption consistency to select promising candidates; and (3) depth-first opportunistic stopping, guided by an instance-specific verifier, that terminates when intent-aligned results are found. Extensive experiments on three SOTA editing models (Step1X-Edit, BAGEL, FLUX.1 Kontext) across three benchmarks show that ADE-CoT achieves superior performance-efficiency trade-offs. With comparable sampling budgets, ADE-CoT obtains better performance with more than 2x speedup over Best-of-N.

The advent of one-step text-to-image (T2I) models offers unprecedented synthesis speed. However, their application to text-guided image editing remains severely hampered, as forcing existing training-free editors into a single inference step fails. This failure manifests as severe object distortion and a critical loss of consistency in non-edited regions, resulting from the high-energy, erratic trajectories produced by naive vector arithmetic on the models' structured fields. To address this problem, we introduce ChordEdit, a model agnostic, training-free, and inversion-free method that facilitates high-fidelity one-step editing. We recast editing as a transport problem between the source and target distributions defined by the source and target text prompts. Leveraging dynamic optimal transport theory, we derive a principled, low-energy control strategy. This strategy yields a smoothed, variance-reduced editing field that is inherently stable, facilitating the field to be traversed in a single, large integration step. A theoretically grounded and experimentally validated approach allows ChordEdit to deliver fast, lightweight and precise edits, finally achieving true real-time editing on these challenging models.

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.

Instruction-guided image-to-image (I2I) editors are increasingly used in consumer and professional visual workflows, where trustworthiness depends not only on prompt compliance but also on equitable preservation of identity-relevant attributes. We formalize two failure modes: Soft Erasure, where requested edits are weakly realized or silently suppressed, and Stereotype Replacement, where edits introduce unrequested, stereotype-consistent demographic attributes. Using a controlled benchmark of 5,040 edited portraits, we evaluate these failures across three recent open-weight editors with vision-language model scoring and human evaluation. Our results show that identity-preservation failures are pervasive and demographically uneven. In particular, 62--71% of outputs exhibit skin lightening, with Indian and Black source portraits affected at 72--75%, compared with 44% for White source portraits, indicating output-level drift toward lighter or more White-presenting appearances when identity constraints are underspecified. In a mitigation case study, prompt-level appearance constraints reduce race-change scores for non-White source portraits by up to 1.48 points, while leaving White source portraits largely unchanged, without modifying model weights. These findings show that identity preservation is not a uniform property of I2I portrait editing systems, but an unevenly distributed trustworthiness failure with direct social consequences. At deployment scale, such silent distortions can shape AI-mediated self-representation and reinforce representational disparities. We introduce a controlled audit protocol for fairness-aware evaluation and governance of generative editing systems. Project page: https://seochan99.github.io/i2i-demographic-bias

Existing multi-turn image editing paradigms are often confined to isolated single-step execution. Due to a lack of context-awareness and closed-loop feedback mechanisms, they are prone to error accumulation and semantic drift during multi-turn interactions, ultimately resulting in severe structural distortion of the generated images. To address this, we propose IMAGAgent, a multi-turn image editing agent framework based on a ``plan--execute--reflect'' closed-loop mechanism that achieves deep synergy among instruction parsing, tool scheduling, and adaptive correction within a unified pipeline. Specifically, we first present a constraint-aware planning module that leverages a vision-language model (VLM) to precisely decompose complex natural language instructions into a series of executable sub-tasks, governed by target singularity, semantic atomicity, and visual perceptibility. Then, the tool-chain orchestration module dynamically constructs execution paths based on the current image, the current sub-task, and the historical context, enabling adaptive scheduling and collaborative operation among heterogeneous operation models covering image retrieval, segmentation, detection, and editing. Finally, we devise a multi-expert collaborative reflection mechanism in which a central large language model (LLM) synthesizes evaluations from multiple vision-language models into holistic feedback, triggering fine-grained self-correction and recording feedback outcomes to optimize future decisions. Extensive experiments on our constructed MTEditBench and the MagicBrush dataset demonstrate that IMAGAgent achieves performance significantly superior to existing methods in terms of instruction consistency, editing precision, and overall quality. The code is available at https://github.com/hackermmzz/IMAGAgent.

Image editing models can modify visual content through natural language, but editing dense documents requires precise local changes amid tightly coupled text, tables, and layout. We introduce VDE Bench, an evaluation resource for studying instruction-guided editing of Chinese and English document images. VDE Bench contains 3,506 instruction-guided image editing samples, including 1,578 text-region edits and 1,928 table-region edits. The benchmark pairs editing instructions and reference images with annotated editing regions and structured OCR outputs. Its evaluation protocol combines region-level and full-page measurements to assess textual correctness, structural fidelity, and visual content preservation. By focusing on the interaction between local edits and their surrounding document context, VDE Bench complements existing visual text editing benchmarks and provides a resource for diagnosing document-specific editing failures.

Instruction-based image editing enables natural-language control over visual modifications, yet existing models falter under Instruction-Visual Complexity (IV-Complexity), where intricate instructions meet cluttered or ambiguous scenes. We introduce RePlan (Region-aligned Planning), a plan-then-execute framework that couples a vision-language planner with a diffusion editor. The planner decomposes instructions via step-by-step reasoning and explicitly grounds them to target regions; the editor then applies changes using a training-free attention-region injection mechanism, enabling precise, parallel multi-region edits without iterative inpainting. To strengthen planning, we apply GRPO-based reinforcement learning using 1K instruction-only examples, yielding substantial gains in reasoning fidelity and format reliability. We further present IV-Edit, a benchmark focused on fine-grained grounding and knowledge-intensive edits. Across IV-Complex settings, RePlan consistently outperforms strong baselines trained on far larger datasets, improving regional precision and overall consistency. Our project page: https://replan-iv-edit.github.io

Recent advancements in diffusion and flow models have greatly improved text-based image editing, yet methods that edit images independently often produce geometrically and photometrically inconsistent results across different views of the same scene. Such inconsistencies are particularly problematic for editing of 3D representations such as NeRFs or Gaussian splat models. We propose a training-free guidance framework that enforces multi-view consistency during the image editing process. The key idea is that corresponding points should look similar after editing. To achieve this, we introduce a consistency loss that guides the denoising process toward coherent edits. The framework is flexible and can be combined with widely varying image editing methods, supporting both dense and sparse multi-view editing setups. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves 3D consistency compared to existing multi-view editing methods. We also show that this increased consistency enables high-quality Gaussian splat editing with sharp details and strong fidelity to user-specified text prompts. Please refer to our project page for video results: https://3d-consistent-editing.github.io/

Diffusion-based text-to-image models have recently been distilled into few-step samplers and fast generators, reducing inference cost while maintaining high image quality. However, text-guided editing with such accelerated backbones remains challenging: inversion in a small number of steps is unreliable, local errors accumulate along the trajectory, and existing fast-editing methods typically rely on backbone-specific inversion procedures, which limits their transferability. In this work, we propose a simple and universal framework for text-guided image editing with arbitrary accelerated diffusion and flow-matching models. Instead of optimizing local, per-timestep objectives, we directly minimize a global editing objective over the entire inversion-generation trajectory. The framework fine-tunes only 1.5-7 % of the base-model parameters through two lightweight LoRA adapters (forward and backward), trained on fewer than 10 K triplets from the publicly available HQ-Edit dataset. We validate our method on three architecturally distinct backbones: consistency-distilled SD1.5 LCM-Dreamshaper, adversarial-distilled SDXL-Turbo, and rectified-flow-distilled Z-Image-Turbo. On PIE-Bench, our method achieves the strongest editing alignment within each backbone family while ensuring a strong level of content preservation. Inference adds no extra steps beyond the standard inversion and editing passes. The project page with visual results is available at iliabeletskii.github.io/inverse-and-edit.

Fashion image editing aims to modify a person's appearance based on a given instruction. Existing methods require auxiliary tools like segmenters and keypoint extractors, lacking a flexible and unified framework. Moreover, these methods are limited in the variety of clothing types they can handle, as most datasets focus on people in clean backgrounds and only include generic garments such as tops, pants, and dresses. These limitations restrict their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we first extend an existing dataset for human generation to include a wider range of apparel and more complex backgrounds. This extended dataset features people wearing diverse items such as tops, pants, dresses, skirts, headwear, scarves, shoes, socks, and bags. Additionally, we propose AnyDesign, a diffusion-based method that enables mask-free editing on versatile areas. Users can simply input a human image along with a corresponding prompt in either text or image format. Our approach incorporates Fashion DiT, equipped with a Fashion-Guidance Attention (FGA) module designed to fuse explicit apparel types and CLIP-encoded apparel features. Both Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method delivers high-quality fashion editing and outperforms contemporary text-guided fashion editing methods.