mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Agentic Planning with Reasoning for Image Styling via Offline RL

arXiv 2603.07148 ↗First posted 7 Mar 2026cs.LGcited by 1

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents

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Abstract (arXiv)

Direct prompt-based editing often fails on complex transformations because vague and subjective prompts often require nuanced understanding of what should be changed in the image. Our core intuition is that leveraging compositional image editing tools rather than direct prompting profits from structured agent-level planning with explicit reasoning, leading to better results. This structured planning framework enables efficient offline RL post-training on quality-scored trajectories to improve performance. We present a tool-based agentic RL post-training framework that addresses this through structured planning with chain-of-thought reasoning. Our key contributions include: (1) A tool-based agentic planning methodology that combines a compositional library of orthogonal primitive transformations, structured context representation, and explicit per-step reasoning to decompose complex styling into interpretable tool sequences. (2) A synthetic data generation pipeline producing three large-scale datasets (each ~10K trajectories) with reasoning chains, plans, and quality scores, as no existing datasets provide such supervision. Our datasets and code are publicly available at the HuggingFace repository. (3) Offline RL training methods for learning planners with reasoning as our core algorithmic contributions, which consistently improve over the Edit-Only baseline in visual quality and instruction following. (4) Comprehensive evaluation across 4B and 8B parameter Qwen3-VL models showing that our methods outperform other baselines in the majority of compositional tasks, validated by human evaluations.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 22 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2026.

Builds on

22 of 53 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Agentic Retoucher for Text-To-Image Generation5 Jan

Other references · 21

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  3. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  4. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
  5. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,539
  6. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  7. 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,747
  8. 2023Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyondcited by 2,179
  9. 2015High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimationcited by 1,916
  10. 2020Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problemscited by 1,873
  11. 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 973
  12. 2023Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimizationcited by 767
9 more
  1. 2019Advantage-Weighted Regression: Simple and Scalable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learningcited by 750
  2. 2024Mastering Text-to-Image Diffusion: Recaptioning, Planning, and Generating with Multimodal LLMscited by 224
  3. 2024STaR-GATE: Teaching Language Models to Ask Clarifying Questionscited by 99
  4. 2025Uniworld-V2: Reinforce Image Editing with Diffusion Negative-aware Finetuning and MLLM Implicit Feedbackcited by 78
  5. 2024StyleShot: A Snapshot on Any Stylecited by 60
  6. 2025DraCo: Draft as CoT for Text-to-Image Preview and Rare Concept Generationcited by 13
  7. 2025Beyond Simple Edits: X-Planner for Complex Instruction-Based Image Editingcited by 8
  8. 2025Diffusion-SDPO: Safeguarded Direct Preference Optimization for Diffusion Modelscited by 6
  9. 2024Point and Instruct: Enabling Precise Image Editing by Unifying Direct Manipulation and Text Instructionscited by 2

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2026Agent Banana: High-Fidelity Image Editing with Agentic Thinking and Tooling
  2. 2026RS-Gen: A Multi-Stage Agentic Framework for Reasoning and Search-Augmented Image Generation
  3. 2026ThinkRL-Edit: Thinking in Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Centric Image Editing
  4. 2025R-Genie: Reasoning-Guided Generative Image Editing
  5. 2026ImageEdit-R1: Boosting Multi-Agent Image Editing via Reinforcement Learning
  6. 2025EditThinker: Unlocking Iterative Reasoning for Any Image Editor
  7. 2026ToolArtist: Tool-Using Unified Multimodal Models for Agentic Image Generation
  8. 2026Probing Visual Planning in Image Editing Models