# UniEditBench: A Unified and Cost-Effective Benchmark for Image and Video Editing via Distilled MLLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15871 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15871/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [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)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05517/) (2024)
- [OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18871/) (2025)
- [AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15738/) (2024)
- [Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04746/) (2024)
- [HunyuanImage 3.0 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23951/) (2025)
- [Scaling Instruction-Based Video Editing with a High-Quality Synthetic Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15742/) (2025)
- [Uniworld-V2: Reinforce Image Editing with Diffusion Negative-aware Finetuning and MLLM Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16888/) (2025)
- [CVPR 2023 Text Guided Video Editing Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16003/) (2023)
- [InstructVid2Vid: Controllable Video Editing with Natural Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12328/) (2023)
- [EditAR: Unified Conditional Generation with Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04699/) (2025)
- [Schedule Your Edit: A Simple yet Effective Diffusion Noise Schedule for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18756/) (2024)
- [In-Context Learning with Unpaired Clips for Instruction-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14648/) (2025)
- [FlowDirector: Training-Free Flow Steering for Precise Text-to-Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05046/) (2025)
- [DNAEdit: Direct Noise Alignment for Text-Guided Rectified Flow Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01430/) (2025)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15772/) (2025)
- [Omni-Video 2: Scaling MLLM-Conditioned Diffusion for Unified Video Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08820/) (2026)
- [EditMGT: Unleashing Potentials of Masked Generative Transformers in Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11715/) (2025)
- [FIA-Edit: Frequency-Interactive Attention for Efficient and High-Fidelity Inversion-Free Text-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12151/) (2025)
- [SNR-Edit: Structure-Aware Noise Rectification for Inversion-Free Flow-Based Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19180/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The evaluation of visual editing models remains fragmented across methods and modalities. Existing benchmarks are often tailored to specific paradigms, making fair cross-paradigm comparisons difficult, while video editing lacks reliable evaluation benchmarks. Furthermore, common automatic metrics often misalign with human preference, yet directly deploying large multimodal models (MLLMs) as evaluators incurs prohibitive computational and financial costs. We present UniEditBench, a unified benchmark for image and video editing that supports reconstruction-based and instruction-driven methods under a shared protocol. UniEditBench includes a structured taxonomy of nine image operations (Add, Remove, Replace, Change, Stroke-based, Extract, Adjust, Count, Reorder) and eight video operations, with coverage of challenging compositional tasks such as counting and spatial reordering. To enable scalable evaluation, we distill a high-capacity MLLM judge (Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B Instruct) into lightweight 4B/8B evaluators that provide multi-dimensional scoring over structural fidelity, text alignment, background consistency, naturalness, and temporal-spatial consistency (for videos). Experiments show that the distilled evaluators maintain strong agreement with human judgments and substantially reduce deployment cost relative to the teacher model. UniEditBench provides a practical and reproducible protocol for benchmarking modern visual editing methods. Our benchmark and the associated reward models are publicly available at https://github.com/wesar1/UniEditBench.
