# A2-Edit: Precise Reference-Guided Image Editing of Arbitrary Objects and Ambiguous Masks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10685 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10685/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06066/) (2024)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [AnyDoor: Zero-shot Object-level Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09481/) (2023)
- [VITON-HD: High-Resolution Virtual Try-On via Misalignment-Aware Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16874/) (2021)
- [GridDehazeNet: Attention-Based Multi-Scale Network for Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03245/) (2019)
- [Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04746/) (2024)
- [In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20690/) (2025)
- [OOTDiffusion: Outfitting Fusion based Latent Diffusion for Controllable Virtual Try-on](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01779/) (2024)
- [CatVTON: Concatenation Is All You Need for Virtual Try-On with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15886/) (2024)
- [UniReal: Universal Image Generation and Editing via Learning Real-world Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07774/) (2024)
- [ACE++: Instruction-Based Image Creation and Editing via Context-Aware Content Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02487/) (2025)
- [CIAGAN: Conditional Identity Anonymization Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09544/) (2020)
- [DreamO: A Unified Framework for Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16915/) (2025)
- [Zero-shot Image Editing with Reference Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07547/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [InsertFuse: A Unified Framework for Multi-Category Reference-Guided Image Insertion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06490/) (2026)
- [From Open Loop to Closed Loop: A Test-Time Iterative Optimization Framework for Reference-Consistent Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04691/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose A^2-Edit, a unified inpainting framework for arbitrary object categories, which allows users to replace any target region with a reference object using only a coarse mask. To address the issues of severe homogenization and limited category coverage in existing datasets, we construct a large-scale multi-category dataset, UniEdit-500K, which includes 8 major categories, 209 fine-grained subcategories, and a total of 500,104 image pairs. Such rich category diversity poses new challenges for the model, requiring it to automatically learn semantic relationships and distinctions across categories. To this end, we introduce the Mixture of Transformer module, which performs differentiated modeling of various object categories through dynamic expert selection, and further enhances cross-category semantic transfer and generalization through collaboration among experts. In addition, we propose a Mask Annealing Training Strategy (MATS) that progressively relaxes mask precision during training, reducing the model's reliance on accurate masks and improving robustness across diverse editing tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as VITON-HD and AnyInsertion demonstrate that A^2-Edit consistently outperforms existing approaches across all metrics, providing a new and efficient solution for arbitrary object editing.