# What Changed? Detecting and Evaluating Instruction-Guided Image Edits with Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20405/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image editing and quality assessment, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 52 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Image editing and quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/image-editing-and-quality-assessment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [AutoMT: A Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Automated Metamorphic Testing of Autonomous Driving Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19438/) (2025)
- [Stateful Visual Encoders for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04433/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction-based image editing models offer increased personalization opportunities in generative tasks. However, properly evaluating their results is challenging, and most of the existing metrics lag in terms of alignment with human judgment and explainability. To tackle these issues, we introduce DICE (DIfference Coherence Estimator), a model designed to detect localized differences between the original and the edited image and to assess their relevance to the given modification request. DICE consists of two key components: a difference detector and a coherence estimator, both built on an autoregressive Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) and trained using a strategy that leverages self-supervision, distillation from inpainting networks, and full supervision. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate each stage of our pipeline, comparing different MLLMs within the proposed framework. We demonstrate that DICE effectively identifies coherent edits, effectively evaluating images generated by different editing models with a strong correlation with human judgment. We publicly release our source code, models, and data.