# KRIS-Bench: Benchmarking Next-Level Intelligent Image Editing Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16707 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16707/

## Key facts

- Cited by 71 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [Generative Multimodal Models are In-Context Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13286/) (2023)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [OmniGen: Unified Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11340/) (2024)
- [MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04788/) (2024)
- [ABO: Dataset and Benchmarks for Real-World 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06199/) (2021)
- [OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15098/) (2024)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [VITON-HD: High-Resolution Virtual Try-On via Misalignment-Aware Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16874/) (2021)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [LMM-R1: Empowering 3B LMMs with Strong Reasoning Abilities Through Two-Stage Rule-Based RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07536/) (2025)
- [AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15738/) (2024)
- [Imagen Editor and EditBench: Advancing and Evaluating Text-Guided Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06909/) (2022)
- [DALL-Eval: Probing the Reasoning Skills and Social Biases of Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04053/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17525/) (2024)
- [HyperStyle: StyleGAN Inversion with HyperNetworks for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15666/) (2021)
- [WISE: A World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07265/) (2025)
- [VIEScore: Towards Explainable Metrics for Conditional Image Synthesis Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14867/) (2023)
- [HQ-Edit: A High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09990/) (2024)
- [SmartEdit: Exploring Complex Instruction-based Image Editing with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06739/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [Uni-cot: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05606/) (2025)
- [Easier Painting Than Thinking: Can Text-to-Image Models Set the Stage, but Not Direct the Play?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03516/) (2025)
- [UniREditBench: A Unified Reasoning-based Image Editing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01295/) (2025)
- [ReasonEdit: Towards Reasoning-Enhanced Image Editing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22625/) (2025)
- [EditThinker: Unlocking Iterative Reasoning for Any Image Editor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05965/) (2025)
- [GenExam: A Multidisciplinary Text-to-Image Exam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14232/) (2025)
- [Factuality Matters: When Image Generation and Editing Meet Structured Visuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05091/) (2025)
- [PICABench: How Far Are We from Physically Realistic Image Editing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17681/) (2025)
- [DeepGen 1.0: A Lightweight Unified Multimodal Model for Advancing Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12205/) (2026)
- [ROVER: Benchmarking Reciprocal Cross-Modal Reasoning for Omnimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01163/) (2025)
- [RULER-Bench: Probing Rule-based Reasoning Abilities of Next-level Video Generation Models for Vision Foundation Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02622/) (2025)
- [ThinkRL-Edit: Thinking in Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Centric Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03467/) (2026)
- [How Well Do Models Follow Visual Instructions? VIBE: A Systematic Benchmark for Visual Instruction-Driven Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01851/) (2026)
- [Quantifying the Gap between Understanding and Generation within Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02140/) (2026)
- [UniReason 1.0: A Unified Reasoning Framework for World Knowledge Aligned Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02437/) (2026)
- [WiseEdit: Benchmarking Cognition- and Creativity-Informed Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00387/) (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)
- [RePlan: Reasoning-guided Region Planning for Complex Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16864/) (2025)
- [MMaDA-Parallel: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Models for Thinking-Aware Editing and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09611/) (2025)
- [TextEditBench: Evaluating Reasoning-aware Text Editing Beyond Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16270/) (2025)
- [UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08336/) (2026)
- [Look Carefully: Adaptive Visual Reinforcements in Multimodal Large Language Models for Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24041/) (2026)
- [GRADE: Benchmarking Discipline-Informed Reasoning in Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12264/) (2026)
- [VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26105/) (2026)
- [ScaleEdit-12M: Scaling Open-Source Image Editing Data Generation via Multi-Agent Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20644/) (2026)
- [GenArena: How Can We Achieve Human-Aligned Evaluation for Visual Generation Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06013/) (2026)
- [ServImage: An Image Generation and Editing Benchmark from Real-world Commercial Imaging Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24023/) (2026)
- [WorldEdit: Towards Open-World Image Editing with a Knowledge-Informed Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07095/) (2026)
- [From Statics to Dynamics: Physics-Aware Image Editing with Latent Transition Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21778/) (2026)
- [CREval: An Automated Interpretable Evaluation for Creative Image Manipulation under Complex Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26174/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in multi-modal generative models have enabled significant progress in instruction-based image editing. However, while these models produce visually plausible outputs, their capacity for knowledge-based reasoning editing tasks remains under-explored. In this paper, we introduce KRIS-Bench (Knowledge-based Reasoning in Image-editing Systems Benchmark), a diagnostic benchmark designed to assess models through a cognitively informed lens. Drawing from educational theory, KRIS-Bench categorizes editing tasks across three foundational knowledge types: Factual, Conceptual, and Procedural. Based on this taxonomy, we design 22 representative tasks spanning 7 reasoning dimensions and release 1,267 high-quality annotated editing instances. To support fine-grained evaluation, we propose a comprehensive protocol that incorporates a novel Knowledge Plausibility metric, enhanced by knowledge hints and calibrated through human studies. Empirical results on 10 state-of-the-art models reveal significant gaps in reasoning performance, highlighting the need for knowledge-centric benchmarks to advance the development of intelligent image editing systems.