# Interactive Image Manipulation with Complex Text Instructions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15352/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [DM-GAN: Dynamic Memory Generative Adversarial Networks for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01310/) (2019)
- [StackGAN++: Realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10916/) (2017)
- [Controllable Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07083/) (2019)
- [AdaAttN: Revisit Attention Mechanism in Arbitrary Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03647/) (2021)
- [MirrorGAN: Learning Text-to-image Generation by Redescription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05854/) (2019)
- [ManiGAN: Text-Guided Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06203/) (2019)
- [Contextual Residual Aggregation for Ultra High-Resolution Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09704/) (2020)
- [CrDoCo: Pixel-level Domain Transfer with Cross-Domain Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03182/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Feature Reasoning for Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03737/) (2020)
- [Learning What and Where to Draw](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02454/) (2016)
- [Text-Adaptive Generative Adversarial Networks: Manipulating Images with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11919/) (2018)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis via Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06873/) (2017)
- [Coloring with Words: Guiding Image Colorization Through Text-based Palette Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04128/) (2018)
- [In the light of feature distributions: moment matching for Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07208/) (2021)
- [TAC-GAN - Text Conditioned Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06412/) (2017)
- [Image Inpainting with External-internal Learning and Monochromic Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09068/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [TKG-DM: Training-free Chroma Key Content Generation Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15580/) (2024)
- [BATINet: Background-Aware Text to Image Synthesis and Manipulation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05921/) (2023)
- [TAUE: Training-free Noise Transplant and Cultivation Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02580/) (2025)
- [Illumination and Shadows in Head Rotation: experiments with Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06057/) (2023)
- [LimeCross: Context-Conditioned Layered Image Editing with Structural Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10319/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, text-guided image manipulation has received increasing attention in the research field of multimedia processing and computer vision due to its high flexibility and controllability. Its goal is to semantically manipulate parts of an input reference image according to the text descriptions. However, most of the existing works have the following problems: (1) text-irrelevant content cannot always be maintained but randomly changed, (2) the performance of image manipulation still needs to be further improved, (3) only can manipulate descriptive attributes. To solve these problems, we propose a novel image manipulation method that interactively edits an image using complex text instructions. It allows users to not only improve the accuracy of image manipulation but also achieve complex tasks such as enlarging, dwindling, or removing objects and replacing the background with the input image. To make these tasks possible, we apply three strategies. First, the given image is divided into text-relevant content and text-irrelevant content. Only the text-relevant content is manipulated and the text-irrelevant content can be maintained. Second, a super-resolution method is used to enlarge the manipulation region to further improve the operability and to help manipulate the object itself. Third, a user interface is introduced for editing the segmentation map interactively to re-modify the generated image according to the user's desires. Extensive experiments on the Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 (CUB) dataset and Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO) datasets demonstrate our proposed method can enable interactive, flexible, and accurate image manipulation in real-time. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we show that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
