# The Promise of RL for Autoregressive Image Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01119 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01119/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [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)
- [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)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [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)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20783/) (2025)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13301/) (2023)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12908/) (2023)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05470/) (2025)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06114/) (2023)
- [Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13848/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [EditScore: Unlocking Online RL for Image Editing via High-Fidelity Reward Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23909/) (2025)
- [Learning an Image Editing Model without Image Editing Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14978/) (2025)
- [Power Reinforcement Post-Training of Text-to-Image Models with Super-Linear Advantage Shaping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10937/) (2026)
- [Modular Energy Steering for Safe Text-to-Image Generation with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02265/) (2026)
- [TECCI: Tricky Edits of Collected and Curated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01213/) (2026)
- [Edit the Bits, Diff the Codes: Bitwise Residual Editing for Visual Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13558/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While image generation techniques are now capable of producing high-quality images that respect prompts which span multiple sentences, the task of text-guided image editing remains a challenge. Even edit requests that consist of only a few words often fail to be executed correctly. We explore three strategies to enhance performance on a wide range of image editing tasks: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning (RL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In order to study all these components in one consistent framework, we adopt an autoregressive multimodal model that processes textual and visual tokens in a unified manner. We find RL combined with a large multi-modal LLM verifier to be the most effective of these strategies. As a result, we release EARL: Editing with Autoregression and RL, a strong RL-based image editing model that performs competitively on a diverse range of edits compared to strong baselines, despite using much less training data. Thus, EARL pushes the frontier of autoregressive multimodal models on image editing. We release our code, training data, and trained models at https://github.com/mair-lab/EARL.