MIRA: Multimodal Iterative Reasoning Agent for Image Editing
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Abstract (arXiv)
Instruction-guided image editing offers an intuitive way for users to edit images with natural language. However, diffusion-based editing models often struggle to accurately interpret complex user instructions, especially those involving compositional relationships, contextual cues, or referring expressions, leading to edits that drift semantically or fail to reflect the intended changes. We tackle this problem by proposing MIRA (Multimodal Iterative Reasoning Agent), a lightweight, plug-and-play multimodal reasoning agent that performs editing through an iterative perception-reasoning-action loop, effectively simulating multi-turn human-model interaction processes. Instead of issuing a single prompt or static plan, MIRA predicts atomic edit instructions step by step, using visual feedback to make its decisions. Our 150K multimodal tool-use dataset, MIRA-Editing, combined with a two-stage SFT + GRPO training pipeline, enables MIRA to perform reasoning and editing over complex editing instructions. When paired with open-source image editing models such as Flux.1-Kontext, Step1X-Edit, and Qwen-Image-Edit, MIRA significantly improves both semantic consistency and perceptual quality, achieving performance comparable to or exceeding proprietary systems such as GPT-Image and Nano-Banana.
Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 54 of its 69 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2025.
Builds on
54 of 69 references.
References · 54
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
- 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,591
- 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,409
- 2021SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 1,903
- 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,769
- 2022Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,172
- 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 973
- 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 960
- 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 855
- 2022DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidancecited by 643
- 2023MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editingcited by 615
38 more
- 2025GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Modelscited by 446
- 2025Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editingcited by 417
- 2024UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scalecited by 266
- 2025OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generationcited by 241
- 2025Seedream 4.0: Toward Next-generation Multimodal Image Generationcited by 233
- 2023TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessmentcited by 220
- 2025In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformercited by 199
- 2023VIEScore: Towards Explainable Metrics for Conditional Image Synthesis Evaluationcited by 196
- 2023SmartEdit: Exploring Complex Instruction-based Image Editing with Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 174
- 2023InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Taskscited by 162
- 2024GenArtist: Multimodal LLM as an Agent for Unified Image Generation and Editingcited by 132
- 2025HiDream-I1: A High-Efficient Image Generative Foundation Model with Sparse Diffusion Transformercited by 131
- 2024SEED-Data-Edit Technical Report: A Hybrid Dataset for Instructional Image Editingcited by 97
- 2023ARNIQA: Learning Distortion Manifold for Image Quality Assessmentcited by 87
- 2023InstructEdit: Improving Automatic Masks for Diffusion-based Image Editing With User Instructionscited by 64
- 2024IMPRINT: Generative Object Compositing by Learning Identity-Preserving Representationcited by 64
- 2025EditScore: Unlocking Online RL for Image Editing via High-Fidelity Reward Modelingcited by 61
- 2024V2Xum-LLM: Cross-Modal Video Summarization with Temporal Prompt Instruction Tuningcited by 45
- 2025ChemAgent: Self-updating Library in Large Language Models Improves Chemical Reasoningcited by 41
- 2024PromptFix: You Prompt and We Fix the Photocited by 40
- 2025MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworkscited by 38
- 2025OmniPaint: Mastering Object-Oriented Editing via Disentangled Insertion-Removal Inpaintingcited by 38
- 2025FireEdit: Fine-grained Instruction-based Image Editing via Region-aware Vision Language Modelcited by 31
- 2025T2I-Copilot: A Training-Free Multi-Agent Text-to-Image System for Enhanced Prompt Interpretation and Interactive Generationcited by 31
- 2023InstructCV: Instruction-Tuned Text-to-Image Diffusion Models as Vision Generalistscited by 30
- 2024MMCOMPOSITION: Revisiting the Compositionality of Pre-trained Vision-Language Modelscited by 29
- 2025Latent Chain-of-Thought for Visual Reasoningcited by 27
- 2024DialogGen: Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System for Multi-turn Text-to-Image Generationcited by 26
- 2024FINECAPTION: Compositional Image Captioning Focusing on Wherever You Want at Any Granularitycited by 26
- 2023LLMGA: Multimodal Large Language Model based Generation Assistantcited by 25
- 2024BattleAgent: Multi-modal Dynamic Emulation on Historical Battles to Complement Historical Analysiscited by 20
- 2025MMIG-Bench: Towards Comprehensive and Explainable Evaluation of Multi-Modal Image Generation Modelscited by 16
- 2024PRESTO: Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomescited by 14
- 2025CompBench: Benchmarking Complex Instruction-guided Image Editingcited by 14
- 2025CellForge: Agentic Design of Virtual Cell Modelscited by 11
- 2025Image Editing As Programs with Diffusion Modelscited by 10
- 2025Beyond Simple Edits: X-Planner for Complex Instruction-Based Image Editingcited by 8
- 2025Video-LMM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Video Reasoning with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 8
50 most cited of 54 All 54 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 15.
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- 2026MementoGUI: Learning Agentic Multimodal Memory Control for Long-Horizon GUI Agentscited by 9
- 2026Aurora: Unified Video Editing with a Tool-Using Agentcited by 7
- 2026Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modelingcited by 5
- 2026VideoArgus: Agentic Rubric-Grounded Unified Evaluation for Video Generation and Editingcited by 5
- 2026CAMEO: A Conditional and Quality-Aware Multi-Agent Image Editing Orchestratorcited by 2
- 2026OmniHarness: Harnessing Generalizable Visual Generation via Symbolic Policy Learningcited by 2
- 2026From Plans to Pixels: Learning to Plan and Orchestrate for Open-Ended Image Editingcited by 1
- 2026Agent Skills Should Go Beyond Text: The Case for Visual Skillscited by 1
- 2026What Can I Edit? Open-Ended Strategy Discovery and the Emotion Editability Landscapecited by 1
- 2026What to Edit Next: Visually Aligned Image-Editing Follow-Up Suggestions in Conversational Systemscited by 1
- 2026Agentic Visual Generation: From Generative Models to Agentic Controlcited by 0
- 2026SegBanana: Steering Unified Multimodal Models into Medical Segmenterscited by 0
- 2026Reasoning-Informed Visual Editing8 Oct 2026
- 2026Multidimensional Observer Model and Perceptual Dimensions of Human Image Quality Assessment29 Sep 2026
- 2026EpiCon: Collective Agent Learning through Co-Evolving Multimodal Memory29 Sep 2026
- 2026SegBanana: Steering Unified Multimodal Models into Medical Segmenters28 Sep 2026
- 2026OmniHarness: Harnessing Generalizable Visual Generation via Symbolic Policy Learning13 Sep 2026
- 2026Agentic Visual Generation: From Generative Models to Agentic Control6 Sep 2026
- 2026VideoArgus: Agentic Rubric-Grounded Unified Evaluation for Video Generation and Editing6 Aug 2026
- 2026What to Edit Next: Visually Aligned Image-Editing Follow-Up Suggestions in Conversational Systems3 Aug 2026
- 2026What Can I Edit? Open-Ended Strategy Discovery and the Emotion Editability Landscape27 Jul 2026
- 2026Agent Skills Should Go Beyond Text: The Case for Visual Skills31 May 2026
- 2026Aurora: Unified Video Editing with a Tool-Using Agent18 May 2026
- 2026MementoGUI: Learning Agentic Multimodal Memory Control for Long-Horizon GUI Agents18 May 2026
3 more
- 2026Aurora: Unified Video Editing with a Tool-Using Agentcited by 7
- 2026Aurora: Unified Video Editing with a Tool-Using Agent18 May 2026
- 2026CAMEO: A Conditional and Quality-Aware Multi-Agent Image Editing Orchestratorcited by 2
- 2026From Plans to Pixels: Learning to Plan and Orchestrate for Open-Ended Image Editingcited by 1
- 2026Agent Skills Should Go Beyond Text: The Case for Visual Skillscited by 1
- 2026What Can I Edit? Open-Ended Strategy Discovery and the Emotion Editability Landscapecited by 1
- 2026What to Edit Next: Visually Aligned Image-Editing Follow-Up Suggestions in Conversational Systemscited by 1
- 2026SegBanana: Steering Unified Multimodal Models into Medical Segmenterscited by 0
- 2026EpiCon: Collective Agent Learning through Co-Evolving Multimodal Memorycited by 0
- 2026Multidimensional Observer Model and Perceptual Dimensions of Human Image Quality Assessmentcited by 0
- 2026Reasoning-Informed Visual Editingcited by 0
- 2026Reasoning-Informed Visual Editing8 Oct 2026
- 2026Multidimensional Observer Model and Perceptual Dimensions of Human Image Quality Assessment29 Sep 2026
- 2026EpiCon: Collective Agent Learning through Co-Evolving Multimodal Memory29 Sep 2026
- 2026SegBanana: Steering Unified Multimodal Models into Medical Segmenters28 Sep 2026
- 2026What to Edit Next: Visually Aligned Image-Editing Follow-Up Suggestions in Conversational Systems3 Aug 2026
- 2026What Can I Edit? Open-Ended Strategy Discovery and the Emotion Editability Landscape27 Jul 2026
- 2026Agent Skills Should Go Beyond Text: The Case for Visual Skills31 May 2026
- 2026From Plans to Pixels: Learning to Plan and Orchestrate for Open-Ended Image Editing14 May 2026
- 2026CAMEO: A Conditional and Quality-Aware Multi-Agent Image Editing Orchestrator3 Apr 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026MSRAMIE: Multimodal Structured Reasoning Agent for Multi-instruction Image Editing
- 2026CoEditor++: Instruction-based Visual Editing via Cognitive Reasoning
- 2025ReasonEdit: Towards Reasoning-Enhanced Image Editing Models
- 2025EditThinker: Unlocking Iterative Reasoning for Any Image Editor
- 2026Is This Edit Correct? A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Reasoning-Aware Image Editing
- 2025Reasoning to Edit: Hypothetical Instruction-Based Image Editing with Visual Reasoning
- 2025R-Genie: Reasoning-Guided Generative Image Editing
- 2026ETCHR: Editing To Clarify and Harness Reasoning