# A Unified and Controllable Framework for Layered Image Generation with Visual Effects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15507 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15507/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.

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

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [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)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11039/) (2024)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [SEED-X: Multimodal Models with Unified Multi-granularity Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14396/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06520/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent image generation models produce impressive composites, but often fail to preserve the identity of user-provided content when editing specific elements: the surrounding scene may shift, and even the edited object's appearance can drift from the original. Layered representation offer a natural remedy--they allow users to independently manipulate individual elements--but existing layered methods typically produce transparent foregrounds without realistic visual effects such as shadows and reflections, forcing the use of a second harmonization model after every edit, which in turn introduces drift. To overcome these limitations, we present LASAGNA, which generates a photorealistic background (BG) and an RGBA foreground with compelling visual effects in a single forward pass. By treating object-associated visual effects as part of the foreground (FG) layer, LASAGNA supports the dominant class of consumer edits (e.g., translation, scaling, recoloring, duplication) via alpha compositing alone, without invoking any model post-edit, thereby eliminating identity drift introduced by cascade editing pipelines. This single-pass design contrasts with prior layered methods that rely on separate expert models for each task. LASAGNA handles diverse conditional inputs--text prompts, FG, BG, and location masks--within a unified architecture. We further release two community resources: LASAGNA-48K, the first public dataset of 48K layered image triplets with photorealistic visual effects, and LASAGNA-BENCH, the first standardized benchmark for layer-centric generation and editing, comprising 242 expert-annotated samples across six diverse sources. Experiments show that LASAGNA outperforms both general-purpose editors and prior layered methods across three generation modes, and supports a wide range of post-edits without any model re-inference.