# FlexEdit: Marrying Free-Shape Masks to VLLM for Flexible Image Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12429 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12429/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 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 27 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2024.

## 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, 27 of 27)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03726/) (2023)
- [AnyDoor: Zero-shot Object-level Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09481/) (2023)
- [SEED-X: Multimodal Models with Unified Multi-granularity Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14396/) (2024)
- [GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00968/) (2023)
- [SmartEdit: Exploring Complex Instruction-based Image Editing with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06739/) (2023)
- [InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03895/) (2023)
- [DetGPT: Detect What You Need via Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14167/) (2023)
- [InstructAny2Pix: Flexible Visual Editing via Multimodal Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06738/) (2023)
- [SmartMask: Context Aware High-Fidelity Mask Generation for Fine-grained Object Insertion and Layout Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05039/) (2023)
- [When ControlNet Meets Inexplicit Masks: A Case Study of ControlNet on its Contour-following Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00467/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20275/) (2025)
- [MagicQuill: An Intelligent Interactive Image Editing System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09703/) (2024)
- [MIND-Edit: MLLM Insight-Driven Editing via Language-Vision Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19149/) (2025)
- [DynamicControl: Adaptive Condition Selection for Improved Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03255/) (2024)
- [Editor's Choice: Evaluating Abstract Intent in Image Editing through Atomic Entity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14842/) (2026)
- [GOPI: Generation-Oriented 3D Pose Inference for Furniture Insertion from Single-View RGB-D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06836/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Combining Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) with diffusion models offers a powerful method for executing image editing tasks based on human language instructions. However, language instructions alone often fall short in accurately conveying user requirements, particularly when users want to add, replace elements in specific areas of an image. Luckily, masks can effectively indicate the exact locations or elements to be edited, while they require users to precisely draw the shapes at the desired locations, which is highly user-unfriendly. To address this, we propose FlexEdit, an end-to-end image editing method that leverages both free-shape masks and language instructions for Flexible Editing. Our approach employs a VLLM in comprehending the image content, mask, and user instructions. Additionally, we introduce the Mask Enhance Adapter (MEA) that fuses the embeddings of the VLLM with the image data, ensuring a seamless integration of mask information and model output embeddings. Furthermore, we construct FSMI-Edit, a benchmark specifically tailored for free-shape mask, including 8 types of free-shape mask. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in LLM-based image editing, and our simple prompting technique stands out in its effectiveness. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/A-new-b/flex_edit.