# CompBench: Benchmarking Complex Instruction-guided Image Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12200 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12200/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06749/) (2025)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [UniREditBench: A Unified Reasoning-based Image Editing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01295/) (2025)
- [MIRA: Multimodal Iterative Reasoning Agent for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21087/) (2025)
- [UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12279/) (2026)
- [I2I-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Image-to-Image Editing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04660/) (2025)
- [Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01893/) (2026)
- [CREval: An Automated Interpretable Evaluation for Creative Image Manipulation under Complex Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26174/) (2026)
- [CAMEO: A Conditional and Quality-Aware Multi-Agent Image Editing Orchestrator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03156/) (2026)
- [VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00122/) (2026)
- [Region-Constrained Group Relative Policy Optimization for Flow-Based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09386/) (2026)
- [VTEdit-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Reference Image Editing Models in Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11734/) (2026)
- [Omni IIE Bench: Benchmarking the Practical Capabilities of Image Editing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16944/) (2026)
- [Editor's Choice: Evaluating Abstract Intent in Image Editing through Atomic Entity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14842/) (2026)
- [HierEdit: Region-Aware Hierarchical Diffusion for Efficient High-Resolution Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17294/) (2026)
- [CV-Arena: An Open Benchmark for Instructional Computer Vision Problem Solving with Human-AI Collaborative Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00931/) (2026)
- [Instruction-based Image Editing: A Survey on Data, Models, Evaluation, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25642/) (2026)
- [Scalable Minimal-Change Learning for Controllable Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06021/) (2026)
- [Pixels or Code? Benchmarking Instruction-Guided Visual Artifact Operation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16444/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While real-world applications increasingly demand intricate scene manipulation, existing instruction-guided image editing benchmarks often oversimplify task complexity and lack comprehensive, fine-grained instructions. To bridge this gap, we introduce CompBench, a large-scale benchmark specifically designed for complex instruction-guided image editing. CompBench features challenging editing scenarios that incorporate fine-grained instruction following, spatial and contextual reasoning, thereby enabling comprehensive evaluation of image editing models' precise manipulation capabilities. To construct CompBench, we propose an MLLM-human collaborative framework with tailored task pipelines. Furthermore, we propose an instruction decoupling strategy that disentangles editing intents into four key dimensions: location, appearance, dynamics, and objects, ensuring closer alignment between instructions and complex editing requirements. Extensive evaluations reveal that CompBench exposes fundamental limitations of current image editing models and provides critical insights for the development of next-generation instruction-guided image editing systems. Our project page is available at https://comp-bench.github.io/.