# InstructX: Towards Unified Visual Editing with MLLM Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08485 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08485/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 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 65 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Image editing and quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/image-editing-and-quality-assessment/)
- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)
- [Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11039/) (2024)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [FateZero: Fusing Attentions for Zero-shot Text-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09535/) (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)
- [BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models-Architecture, Training and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09568/) (2025)
- [SEED-X: Multimodal Models with Unified Multi-granularity Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14396/) (2024)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Unified-IO 2: Scaling Autoregressive Multimodal Models with Vision, Language, Audio, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17172/) (2023)
- [OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18871/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19808/) (2025)
- [OpenVE-3M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-Guided Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07826/) (2025)
- [Kiwi-Edit: Versatile Video Editing via Instruction and Reference Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02175/) (2026)
- [IVEBench: Modern Benchmark Suite for Instruction-Guided Video Editing Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11647/) (2025)
- [VIVA: VLM-Guided Instruction-Based Video Editing with Reward Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16906/) (2025)
- [VideoCoF: Unified Video Editing with Temporal Reasoner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07469/) (2025)
- [SAMA: Factorized Semantic Anchoring and Motion Alignment for Instruction-Guided Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19228/) (2026)
- [Towards Reason-Informed Video Editing in Unified Models with Self-Reflective Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09924/) (2025)
- [OmniTransfer: All-in-one Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14250/) (2026)
- [VDOT: Efficient Unified Video Creation via Optimal Transport Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06802/) (2025)
- [UMO: Unified In-Context Learning Unlocks Motion Foundation Model Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15975/) (2026)
- [Video Understanding: From Geometry and Semantics to Unified Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17840/) (2026)
- [Exploring MLLM-Diffusion Information Transfer with MetaCanvas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11464/) (2025)
- [LIVEditor-14B: Lightning Unified Video Editing via In-Context Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04569/) (2026)
- [CoT-Edit: Let CoT Guide Instruction Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01113/) (2026)
- [EffectMaker: Unifying Reasoning and Generation for Customized Visual Effect Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06014/) (2026)
- [JoVA: Unified Multimodal Learning for Joint Video-Audio Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13677/) (2025)
- [InsEdit: Towards Instruction-based Visual Editing via Data-Efficient Video Diffusion Models Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08646/) (2026)
- [Sparkle: Realizing Lively Instruction-Guided Video Background Replacement via Decoupled Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06535/) (2026)
- [HOMIE: Human-object Centric Video Personalization via Multimodal Intelligent Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18217/) (2026)
- [OmniEdit-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05049/) (2026)
- [UniVVT: A Unified End-to-End Framework for High-Fidelity Video Virtual Try-on](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05745/) (2026)
- [What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20795/) (2026)
- [Bootstrap Your Generator: Unpaired Visual Editing with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03911/) (2026)
- [MoRoute: Dynamic Routing for In-Context Multimodal Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29545/) (2026)
- [ContextMaster: Interactive Multi-Shot Video Creation via Fixed-Budget Sparse Context Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04956/) (2026)
- [InstructVVT: Instruction-Driven Video Virtual Try-On without Auxiliary Spatial Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14070/) (2026)
- [From Dense Prediction to Visual Editing: Structured Supervision for Unified Image and Video Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14740/) (2026)
- [RefVideo-6M: A Reliable Reference-Based Dataset for Instructional Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26101/) (2026)
- [VideoX-Qwen: Data-Centric Instruction-Based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26015/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) showing strong visual understanding and reasoning, interest is growing in using them to improve the editing performance of diffusion models. Despite rapid progress, most studies lack an in-depth analysis of MLLM design choices. Moreover, the integration of MLLMs and diffusion models remains an open challenge in some difficult tasks, such as video editing. In this paper, we present InstructX, a unified framework for image and video editing. Specifically, we conduct a comprehensive study on integrating MLLMs and diffusion models for instruction-driven editing across diverse tasks. Building on this study, we analyze the cooperation and distinction between images and videos in unified modeling. (1) We show that training on image data can lead to emergent video editing capabilities without explicit supervision, thereby alleviating the constraints imposed by scarce video training data. (2) By incorporating modality-specific MLLM features, our approach effectively unifies image and video editing tasks within a single model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can handle a broad range of image and video editing tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance.