mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Making Image Editing Easier via Adaptive Task Reformulation with Agentic Executions

arXiv 2604.15917 ↗First posted 17 Apr 2026cs.CVcited by 2

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction guided image editing has advanced substantially with recent generative models, yet it still fails to produce reliable results across many seemingly simple cases. We observe that a large portion of these failures stem not from insufficient model capacity, but from poorly formulated editing tasks, such as those involving small targets, implicit spatial relations, or under-specified instructions. In this work, we frame image editing failures as a task formulation problem and propose an adaptive task reformulation framework that improves editing performance without modifying the underlying model. Our key idea is to transform the original image-instruction pair into a sequence of operations that are dynamically determined and executed by a MLLM agent through analysis, routing, reformulation, and feedback-driven refinement. Experiments on multiple benchmarks, including ImgEdit, PICA, and RePlan, across diverse editing backbones such as Qwen Image Edit and Nano Banana, show consistent improvements, with especially large gains on challenging cases. These results suggest that task reformulation is a critical but underexplored factor, and that substantial gains can be achieved by better matching editing tasks to the effective operating regime of existing models.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers 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 18 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2026.

Builds on

18 of 28 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024GenArtist: Multimodal LLM as an Agent for Unified Image Generation and Editing8 Jul

Other references · 17

  1. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,094
  2. 2022DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generationcited by 3,286
  3. 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,591
  4. 2023HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Facecited by 1,173
  5. 2022Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,172
  6. 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 973
  7. 2022DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidancecited by 643
  8. 2023MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editingcited by 615
  9. 2023Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Taskscited by 321
  10. 2023Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifoldcited by 218
  11. 2021Design Guidelines for Prompt Engineering Text-to-Image Generative Modelscited by 216
  12. 2023InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Taskscited by 162
5 more
  1. 2023EditVal: Benchmarking Diffusion Based Text-Guided Image Editing Methodscited by 52
  2. 2025PICABench: How Far Are We from Physically Realistic Image Editing?cited by 13
  3. 2025RePlan: Reasoning-guided Region Planning for Complex Instruction-based Image Editingcited by 9
  4. 2025RegionE: Adaptive Region-Aware Generation for Efficient Image Editingcited by 6
  5. 2024Learning Position-Aware Implicit Neural Network for Real-World Face Inpaintingcited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Agent Banana: High-Fidelity Image Editing with Agentic Thinking and Tooling
  2. 2026Scalable Minimal-Change Learning for Controllable Image Editing
  3. 2025EditThinker: Unlocking Iterative Reasoning for Any Image Editor
  4. 2026ImageEdit-R1: Boosting Multi-Agent Image Editing via Reinforcement Learning
  5. 2026IMAGAgent: Orchestrating Multi-Turn Image Editing via Constraint-Aware Planning and Reflection
  6. 2025Lego-Edit: A General Image Editing Framework with Model-Level Bricks and MLLM Builder
  7. 2025An LLM-LVLM Driven Agent for Iterative and Fine-Grained Image Editing
  8. 2026EditRefiner: A Human-Aligned Agentic Framework for Image Editing Refinement