# Making Image Editing Easier via Adaptive Task Reformulation with Agentic Executions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15917 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15917/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10973/) (2023)
- [Design Guidelines for Prompt Engineering Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06977/) (2021)
- [InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03895/) (2023)
- [GenArtist: Multimodal LLM as an Agent for Unified Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05600/) (2024)
- [EditVal: Benchmarking Diffusion Based Text-Guided Image Editing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02426/) (2023)
- [PICABench: How Far Are We from Physically Realistic Image Editing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17681/) (2025)
- [RePlan: Reasoning-guided Region Planning for Complex Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16864/) (2025)
- [RegionE: Adaptive Region-Aware Generation for Efficient Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25590/) (2025)
- [Learning Position-Aware Implicit Neural Network for Real-World Face Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10537/) (2024)

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

- [Breaking Dual Bottlenecks: Evolving Unified Multimodal Models into Self-Adaptive Interleaved Visual Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14709/) (2026)
- [Agentic Visual Generation: From Generative Models to Agentic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06758/) (2026)

## 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.