mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

VIRAL: Visual In-Context Reasoning via Analogy in Diffusion Transformers

arXiv 2602.03210 ↗First posted 3 Feb 2026cs.CVcited by 3

On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing

Abstract (arXiv)

Replicating In-Context Learning (ICL) in computer vision remains challenging due to task heterogeneity. We propose VIRAL, a framework that elicits visual reasoning from a pre-trained image editing model by formulating ICL as conditional generation via visual analogy (xs : xt :: xq : yq). We adapt a frozen Diffusion Transformer (DiT) using role-aware multi-image conditioning and introduce a Mixture-of-Experts LoRA to mitigate gradient interference across diverse tasks. Additionally, to bridge the gaps in current visual context datasets, we curate a large-scale dataset spanning perception, restoration, and editing. Experiments demonstrate that VIRAL outperforms existing methods, validating that a unified V-ICL paradigm can handle the majority of visual tasks, including open-domain editing. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VIRAL-744A

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 3 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.

Builds on

3 of 41 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2022DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models26 Oct

Other references · 2

  1. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,158
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

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  1. 2024Analogist: Out-of-the-box Visual In-Context Learning with Image Diffusion Model
  2. 2026Enhancing Multimodal In-Context Learning via Inductive-Deductive Reasoning
  3. 2026Improving Visual Reasoning with Iterative Evidence Refinement
  4. 2025R-Genie: Reasoning-Guided Generative Image Editing
  5. 2026ICLR: In-Context Imitation Learning with Visual Reasoning
  6. 2026SD-MAR: Multi-image Analytical Reasoning via Synthetic Data and Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2025Activating Visual Context and Commonsense Reasoning through Masked Prediction in VLMs
  8. 2025In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer