# EditVal: Benchmarking Diffusion Based Text-Guided Image Editing Methods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02426 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02426/

## Key facts

- Cited by 54 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 24 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [InstantBooth: Personalized Text-to-Image Generation without Test-Time Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03411/) (2023)
- [Simple Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06230/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00986/) (2023)
- [Effective Data Augmentation With Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07944/) (2023)
- [SINE: SINgle Image Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04489/) (2022)
- [CyCLIP: Cyclic Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14459/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Spatial Relationships in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10015/) (2022)
- [Dataset Interfaces: Diagnosing Model Failures Using Controllable Counterfactual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07865/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20275/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17525/) (2024)
- [Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02567/) (2025)
- [KRIS-Bench: Benchmarking Next-Level Intelligent Image Editing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16707/) (2025)
- [I2EBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14180/) (2024)
- [VBench++: Comprehensive and Versatile Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13503/) (2024)
- [MULAN: A Multi Layer Annotated Dataset for Controllable Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02790/) (2024)
- [ColorPeel: Color Prompt Learning with Diffusion Models via Color and Shape Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07197/) (2024)
- [LIME: Localized Image Editing via Attention Regularization in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09256/) (2023)
- [VINCIE: Unlocking In-context Image Editing from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10941/) (2025)
- [ReMOVE: A Reference-free Metric for Object Erasure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00707/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Vision-Language Compositional Understanding with Multimodal Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01167/) (2025)
- [SGEdit: Bridging LLM with Text2Image Generative Model for Scene Graph-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11815/) (2024)
- [Balancing Preservation and Modification: A Region and Semantic Aware Metric for Instruction-Based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13827/) (2025)
- [UnicEdit-10M: A Dataset and Benchmark Breaking the Scale-Quality Barrier via Unified Verification for Reasoning-Enriched Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02790/) (2025)
- [MultiBanana: A Challenging Benchmark for Multi-Reference Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22989/) (2025)
- [Image Editing with Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13226/) (2025)
- [MedEBench: Diagnosing Reliability in Text-Guided Medical Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01921/) (2025)
- [Human-Aligned MLLM Judges for Fine-Grained Image Editing Evaluation: A Benchmark, Framework, and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13028/) (2026)
- [Towards Scalable Human-aligned Benchmark for Text-guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00502/) (2025)
- [I2I-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Image-to-Image Editing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04660/) (2025)
- [Preserve or Modify? Context-Aware Evaluation for Balancing Preservation and Modification in Text-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11374/) (2024)
- [What's Producible May Not Be Reachable: Measuring the Steerability of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17482/) (2025)
- [HANDI: Hand-Centric Text-and-Image Conditioned Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04189/) (2024)
- [Understanding Generative AI Capabilities in Everyday Image Editing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16181/) (2025)
- [EditHF-1M: A Million-Scale Rich Human Preference Feedback for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14916/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Image Editing with LLMs: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Intermediate-Layer Probing Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19775/) (2026)
- [CREval: An Automated Interpretable Evaluation for Creative Image Manipulation under Complex Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26174/) (2026)
- [Towards Small Object Editing: A Benchmark Dataset and A Training-Free Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01545/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A plethora of text-guided image editing methods have recently been developed by leveraging the impressive capabilities of large-scale diffusion-based generative models such as Imagen and Stable Diffusion. A standardized evaluation protocol, however, does not exist to compare methods across different types of fine-grained edits. To address this gap, we introduce EditVal, a standardized benchmark for quantitatively evaluating text-guided image editing methods. EditVal consists of a curated dataset of images, a set of editable attributes for each image drawn from 13 possible edit types, and an automated evaluation pipeline that uses pre-trained vision-language models to assess the fidelity of generated images for each edit type. We use EditVal to benchmark 8 cutting-edge diffusion-based editing methods including SINE, Imagic and Instruct-Pix2Pix. We complement this with a large-scale human study where we show that EditVall's automated evaluation pipeline is strongly correlated with human-preferences for the edit types we considered. From both the human study and automated evaluation, we find that: (i) Instruct-Pix2Pix, Null-Text and SINE are the top-performing methods averaged across different edit types, however it only Instruct-Pix2Pix and Null-Text are able to preserve original image properties; (ii) Most of the editing methods fail at edits involving spatial operations (e.g., changing the position of an object). (iii) There is no `winner' method which ranks the best individually across a range of different edit types. We hope that our benchmark can pave the way to developing more reliable text-guided image editing tools in the future. We will publicly release EditVal, and all associated code and human-study templates to support these research directions in https://deep-ml-research.github.io/editval/.