# ComplexBench-Edit: Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Driven Image Editing via Compositional Dependencies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12830 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12830/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [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)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15738/) (2024)
- [In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20690/) (2025)
- [Visual In-Context Learning for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11574/) (2024)
- [GoT: Unleashing Reasoning Capability of Multimodal Large Language Model for Visual Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10639/) (2025)
- [SEED-Data-Edit Technical Report: A Hybrid Dataset for Instructional Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04007/) (2024)
- [I2EBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14180/) (2024)
- [VARGPT: Unified Understanding and Generation in a Visual Autoregressive Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12327/) (2025)
- [Object-aware Inversion and Reassembly for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12149/) (2023)
- [HumanEdit: A High-Quality Human-Rewarded Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04280/) (2024)
- [textttComplex-Edit: CoT-Like Instruction Generation for Complexity-Controllable Image Editing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13143/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Model with Representation Alignment for Protein Inverse Folding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09380/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [UniREditBench: A Unified Reasoning-based Image Editing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01295/) (2025)
- [X-Ray-CoT: Interpretable Chest X-ray Diagnosis with Vision-Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12455/) (2025)
- [ServImage: An Image Generation and Editing Benchmark from Real-world Commercial Imaging Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24023/) (2026)
- [Coherent Multimodal Reasoning with Iterative Self-Evaluation for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02886/) (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)
- [MV-CoRe: Multimodal Visual-Conceptual Reasoning for Complex Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07023/) (2025)
- [CIMR: Contextualized Iterative Multimodal Reasoning for Robust Instruction Following in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22074/) (2025)
- [LumiGen: An LVLM-Enhanced Iterative Framework for Fine-Grained Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04732/) (2025)
- [Context-Aware Multi-Turn Visual-Textual Reasoning in LVLMs via Dynamic Memory and Adaptive Visual Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05669/) (2025)
- [AEGIS: Exploring the Limit of World Knowledge Capabilities for Unified Mulitmodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00561/) (2026)
- [LADR: Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue for Efficient Text-to-Image Generation with Diffusion Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13450/) (2026)
- [LVLM-Composer's Explicit Planning for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04152/) (2025)
- [Contextualized Multimodal Lifelong Person Re-Identification in Hybrid Clothing States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11247/) (2025)
- [LsrIF: Enhancing Logic-Structured Instruction Following of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06431/) (2026)
- [AE-LLM: Adaptive Efficiency Optimization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20492/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Retrieval Augmented Generation for Adversarial Technique Annotation in Cyber Threat Intelligence Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14166/) (2026)
- [CV-Arena: An Open Benchmark for Instructional Computer Vision Problem Solving with Human-AI Collaborative Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00931/) (2026)
- [Spectral Origins of the Self-Correction Blind Spot in Autoregressive Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09803/) (2026)
- [Instruction-based Image Editing: A Survey on Data, Models, Evaluation, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25642/) (2026)
- [Pixels or Code? Benchmarking Instruction-Guided Visual Artifact Operation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16444/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-driven image editing has achieved remarkable success in following single instructions. However, real-world scenarios often involve complex, multi-step instructions, particularly ``chain'' instructions where operations are interdependent. Current models struggle with these intricate directives, and existing benchmarks inadequately evaluate such capabilities. Specifically, they often overlook multi-instruction and chain-instruction complexities, and common consistency metrics are flawed. To address this, we introduce ComplexBench-Edit, a novel benchmark designed to systematically assess model performance on complex, multi-instruction, and chain-dependent image editing tasks. ComplexBench-Edit also features a new vision consistency evaluation method that accurately assesses non-modified regions by excluding edited areas. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet powerful Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based approach that significantly enhances the ability of existing models to follow complex instructions. Our extensive experiments demonstrate ComplexBench-Edit's efficacy in differentiating model capabilities and highlight the superior performance of our CoT-based method in handling complex edits. The data and code are released at https://github.com/llllly26/ComplexBench-Edit.