# MIRA: Multimodal Iterative Reasoning Agent for Image Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21087/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [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)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [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)
- [GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06471/) (2025)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18871/) (2025)
- [Seedream 4.0: Toward Next-generation Multimodal Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20427/) (2025)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20690/) (2025)
- [VIEScore: Towards Explainable Metrics for Conditional Image Synthesis Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14867/) (2023)
- [SmartEdit: Exploring Complex Instruction-based Image Editing with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06739/) (2023)
- [InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03895/) (2023)
- [HiDream-I1: A High-Efficient Image Generative Foundation Model with Sparse Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22705/) (2025)
- [GenArtist: Multimodal LLM as an Agent for Unified Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05600/) (2024)
- [SEED-Data-Edit Technical Report: A Hybrid Dataset for Instructional Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04007/) (2024)
- [ARNIQA: Learning Distortion Manifold for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14918/) (2023)
- [InstructEdit: Improving Automatic Masks for Diffusion-based Image Editing With User Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18047/) (2023)
- [IMPRINT: Generative Object Compositing by Learning Identity-Preserving Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10701/) (2024)
- [EditScore: Unlocking Online RL for Image Editing via High-Fidelity Reward Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23909/) (2025)
- [V2Xum-LLM: Cross-Modal Video Summarization with Temporal Prompt Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12353/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [MementoGUI: Learning Agentic Multimodal Memory Control for Long-Horizon GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18652/) (2026)
- [Aurora: Unified Video Editing with a Tool-Using Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18748/) (2026)
- [Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.28185/) (2026)
- [VideoArgus: Agentic Rubric-Grounded Unified Evaluation for Video Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05485/) (2026)
- [CAMEO: A Conditional and Quality-Aware Multi-Agent Image Editing Orchestrator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03156/) (2026)
- [Agent Skills Should Go Beyond Text: The Case for Visual Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01414/) (2026)
- [What Can I Edit? Open-Ended Strategy Discovery and the Emotion Editability Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23920/) (2026)
- [What to Edit Next: Visually Aligned Image-Editing Follow-Up Suggestions in Conversational Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07565/) (2026)
- [OmniHarness: Harnessing Generalizable Visual Generation via Symbolic Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16057/) (2026)
- [From Plans to Pixels: Learning to Plan and Orchestrate for Open-Ended Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15181/) (2026)
- [Agentic Visual Generation: From Generative Models to Agentic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06758/) (2026)
- [EpiCon: Collective Agent Learning through Co-Evolving Multimodal Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37923/) (2026)
- [SegBanana: Steering Unified Multimodal Models into Medical Segmenters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34235/) (2026)
- [Multidimensional Observer Model and Perceptual Dimensions of Human Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38487/) (2026)
- [Reasoning-Informed Visual Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12343/) (2026)
- [VIEWCRAFT: Evolving What Multimodal Agents See and How They Read It](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15915/) (2026)
- [BluePixel: Toward Native 4K Agentic Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19882/) (2026)

## 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.