mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing

arXiv 2504.17761 ↗First posted 24 Apr 2025cs.CVcited by 429

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Cited by 92 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, image editing models have witnessed remarkable and rapid development. The recent unveiling of cutting-edge multimodal models such as GPT-4o and Gemini2 Flash has introduced highly promising image editing capabilities. These models demonstrate an impressive aptitude for fulfilling a vast majority of user-driven editing requirements, marking a significant advancement in the field of image manipulation. However, there is still a large gap between the open-source algorithm with these closed-source models. Thus, in this paper, we aim to release a state-of-the-art image editing model, called Step1X-Edit, which can provide comparable performance against the closed-source models like GPT-4o and Gemini2 Flash. More specifically, we adopt the Multimodal LLM to process the reference image and the user's editing instruction. A latent embedding has been extracted and integrated with a diffusion image decoder to obtain the target image. To train the model, we build a data generation pipeline to produce a high-quality dataset. For evaluation, we develop the GEdit-Bench, a novel benchmark rooted in real-world user instructions. Experimental results on GEdit-Bench demonstrate that Step1X-Edit outperforms existing open-source baselines by a substantial margin and approaches the performance of leading proprietary models, thereby making significant contributions to the field of image editing.

Key facts. Cited by 429 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 66 of its 75 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2025.

Builds on

66 of 75 references.

References · 66

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  3. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  4. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  5. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  6. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  7. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  8. 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 5,503
  9. 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,356
  10. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
  11. 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,863
  12. 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,611
38 more
  1. 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,431
  2. 2020RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flowcited by 2,415
  3. 2024HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Modelscited by 1,660
  4. 2023T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,351
  5. 2023ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depthcited by 657
  6. 2023MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editingcited by 624
  7. 2023Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translationcited by 505
  8. 2023Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Taskscited by 410
  9. 2024OmniGen: Unified Image Generationcited by 394
  10. 2024OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformercited by 340
  11. 2023Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Taskscited by 324
  12. 2023Recognize Anything: A Strong Image Tagging Modelcited by 309
  13. 2024UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scalecited by 268
  14. 2024AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Ideacited by 241
  15. 2023OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generationcited by 238
  16. 2025Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueriescited by 236
  17. 2022Imagen Editor and EditBench: Advancing and Evaluating Text-Guided Image Inpaintingcited by 233
  18. 2023Michelangelo: Conditional 3D Shape Generation based on Shape-Image-Text Aligned Latent Representationcited by 228
  19. 2024Mastering Text-to-Image Diffusion: Recaptioning, Planning, and Generating with Multimodal LLMscited by 224
  20. 2024BrushNet: A Plug-and-Play Image Inpainting Model with Decomposed Dual-Branch Diffusioncited by 202
  21. 2023VIEScore: Towards Explainable Metrics for Conditional Image Synthesis Evaluationcited by 201
  22. 2024HQ-Edit: A High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editingcited by 193
  23. 2023One Transformer Fits All Distributions in Multi-Modal Diffusion at Scalecited by 187
  24. 2023SmartEdit: Exploring Complex Instruction-based Image Editing with Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 177
  25. 2023HIVE: Harnessing Human Feedback for Instructional Visual Editingcited by 173
  26. 2023A Task is Worth One Word: Learning with Task Prompts for High-Quality Versatile Image Inpaintingcited by 169
  27. 2020PP-OCR: A Practical Ultra Lightweight OCR Systemcited by 151
  28. 2024OmniEdit: Building Image Editing Generalist Models Through Specialist Supervisioncited by 145
  29. 2024Koala-36M: A Large-scale Video Dataset Improving Consistency between Fine-grained Conditions and Video Contentcited by 135
  30. 2024Bilateral Reference for High-Resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentationcited by 112
  31. 2025GoT: Unleashing Reasoning Capability of Multimodal Large Language Model for Visual Generation and Editingcited by 104
  32. 2024SEED-Data-Edit Technical Report: A Hybrid Dataset for Instructional Image Editingcited by 97
  33. 2025ACE++: Instruction-Based Image Creation and Editing via Context-Aware Content Fillingcited by 95
  34. 2024Instruct-Imagen: Image Generation with Multi-modal Instructioncited by 65
  35. 2023InstructEdit: Improving Automatic Masks for Diffusion-based Image Editing With User Instructionscited by 64
  36. 2024SeedEdit: Align Image Re-Generation to Image Editingcited by 61
  37. 2025Se~norita-2M: A High-Quality Instruction-based Dataset for General Video Editing by Video Specialistscited by 61
  38. 2024ControlVAR: Exploring Controllable Visual Autoregressive Modelingcited by 58

50 most cited of 66 All 66 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 165; 2026: 264.

429 papers.

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  1. 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 1,044
  2. 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 1,006
  3. 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 897
  4. 2025Z-Image: An Efficient Image Generation Foundation Model with Single-Stream Diffusion Transformercited by 277
  5. 2025OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generationcited by 253
  6. 2025ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmarkcited by 231
  7. 2025In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformercited by 204
  8. 2025Emu3.5: Native Multimodal Models are World Learnerscited by 132
  9. 2025LongCat-Image Technical Reportcited by 100
  10. 2025ShareGPT-4o-Image: Aligning Multimodal Models with GPT-4o-Level Image Generationcited by 97
  11. 2025Step1X-3D: Towards High-Fidelity and Controllable Generation of Textured 3D Assetscited by 87
  12. 2025UniVideo: Unified Understanding, Generation, and Editing for Videoscited by 87
38 more
  1. 2025Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 85
  2. 2025Uniworld-V2: Reinforce Image Editing with Diffusion Negative-aware Finetuning and MLLM Implicit Feedbackcited by 79
  3. 2025KRIS-Bench: Benchmarking Next-Level Intelligent Image Editing Modelscited by 71
  4. 2025GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M: A Million-Scale, GPT-Generated Image Datasetcited by 70
  5. 2025Ovis-U1 Technical Reportcited by 67
  6. 2025UniWorld-V1: High-Resolution Semantic Encoders for Unified Visual Understanding and Generationcited by 66
  7. 2025EditScore: Unlocking Online RL for Image Editing via High-Fidelity Reward Modelingcited by 64
  8. 2025EditReward: A Human-Aligned Reward Model for Instruction-Guided Image Editingcited by 62
  9. 2025Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editingcited by 61
  10. 2025NextStep-1: Toward Autoregressive Image Generation with Continuous Tokens at Scalecited by 57
  11. 2025Uni-cot: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Visioncited by 56
  12. 2025EditVerse: Unifying Image and Video Editing and Generation with In-Context Learningcited by 54
  13. 2025BLIP3o-NEXT: Next Frontier of Native Image Generationcited by 54
  14. 2025SeedEdit 3.0: Fast and High-Quality Generative Image Editingcited by 53
  15. 2025OpenVE-3M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-Guided Video Editingcited by 53
  16. 2025OneCAT: Decoder-Only Auto-Regressive Model for Unified Understanding and Generationcited by 50
  17. 2025Reconstruction Alignment Improves Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 49
  18. 2025MiniMax-Remover: Taming Bad Noise Helps Video Object Removalcited by 45
  19. 2025UniLiP: Adapting CLIP for Unified Multimodal Understanding, Generation and Editingcited by 44
  20. 2025Skywork UniPic 2.0: Building Kontext Model with Online RL for Unified Multimodal Modelcited by 41
  21. 2025JarvisArt: Liberating Human Artistic Creativity via an Intelligent Photo Retouching Agentcited by 39
  22. 2025DreamOmni2: Multimodal Instruction-based Editing and Generationcited by 38
  23. 2026FireRed-Image-Edit-1.0 Technical Reportcited by 36
  24. 2025In-Context Learning with Unpaired Clips for Instruction-based Video Editingcited by 35
  25. 2025Qwen-Image-Layered: Towards Inherent Editability via Layer Decompositioncited by 34
  26. 2025NoHumansRequired: Autonomous High-Quality Image Editing Triplet Miningcited by 33
  27. 2025InstructX: Towards Unified Visual Editing with MLLM Guidancecited by 32
  28. 2026HiDream-O1-Image: A Natively Unified Image Generative Foundation Model with Pixel-level Unified Transformercited by 32
  29. 2026SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecturecited by 32
  30. 2025JarvisEvo: Towards a Self-Evolving Photo Editing Agent with Synergistic Editor-Evaluator Optimizationcited by 31
  31. 2025MindOmni: Unleashing Reasoning Generation in Vision Language Models with RGPOcited by 30
  32. 2025ChronoEdit: Towards Temporal Reasoning for Image Editing and World Simulationcited by 29
  33. 2025IMAGHarmony: Controllable Image Editing with Consistent Object Quantity and Layoutcited by 28
  34. 2025Ming-UniVision: Joint Image Understanding and Generation with a Unified Continuous Tokenizercited by 28
  35. 2026InternVL-U: Democratizing Unified Multimodal Models for Understanding, Reasoning, Generation and Editingcited by 28
  36. 2025Omni-Effects: Unified and Spatially-Controllable Visual Effects Generationcited by 27
  37. 2026VINO: A Unified Visual Generator with Interleaved OmniModal Contextcited by 26
  38. 2025X2Edit: Revisiting Arbitrary-Instruction Image Editing through Self-Constructed Data and Task-Aware Representation Learningcited by 25

50 most cited of 429 All 429 (JSON)

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  1. 2023EditVal: Benchmarking Diffusion Based Text-Guided Image Editing Methods
  2. 2025Image Editing with Diffusion Models: A Survey
  3. 2025PIXELS: Progressive Image Xemplar-based Editing with Latent Surgery
  4. 2025FlashEdit: Decoupling Speed, Structure, and Semantics for Precise Image Editing
  5. 2022Fine-grained Image Editing by Pixel-wise Guidance Using Diffusion Models
  6. 2024A Survey of Multimodal-Guided Image Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
  7. 2026WhereEdit: Mask-aware Local Latent Editing for One-Step Image Editing
  8. 2024PixLens: A Novel Framework for Disentangled Evaluation in Diffusion-Based Image Editing with Object Detection + SAM