# EditRefiner: A Human-Aligned Agentic Framework for Image Editing Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07457 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07457/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 56 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)
- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Diffusion and multimodal model alignment](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/diffusion-and-multimodal-model-alignment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07201/) (2023)
- [MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08465/) (2023)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02716/) (2024)
- [Seedream 4.0: Toward Next-generation Multimodal Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20427/) (2025)
- [FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08629/) (2024)
- [Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation: A Highly Efficient Perceptual Image Quality Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3052/) (2013)
- [HQ-Edit: A High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09990/) (2024)
- [What do different evaluation metrics tell us about saliency models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03605/) (2016)
- [Rich Human Feedback for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10240/) (2023)
- [Ovis2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11737/) (2025)
- [ACE++: Instruction-Based Image Creation and Editing via Context-Aware Content Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02487/) (2025)
- [Predicting Human Eye Fixations via an LSTM-based Saliency Attentive Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09571/) (2016)
- [KRIS-Bench: Benchmarking Next-Level Intelligent Image Editing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16707/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Agentic Visual Generation: From Generative Models to Agentic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06758/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent text-guided image editing (TIE) models have made remarkable progress, yet edited images still frequently suffer from fine-grained issues such as unnatural objects, lighting mismatch, and unexpected changes. Existing refinement approaches either rely on costly iterative regeneration or employ vision-language models (VLMs) with weak spatial grounding, often resulting in semantic drift and unreliable local corrections. To address these limitations, we first construct EditFHF-15K, a dataset of fine-grained human feedback for edited images, comprising (1) 15K images from 12 TIE models spanning 43 editing tasks, (2) 60K annotated artifact regions and 80K editing failure regions, each accompanied by textual reasoning, and (3) 45K mean opinion scores (MOSs) assessing perceptual quality, instruction following, and visual consistency. Based on EditFHF-15K, we propose EditRefiner, a hierarchical, interpretable, and human-aligned agentic framework that reformulates post-editing correction as a human-like perception-reasoning-action-evaluation loop. Specifically, we introduce: (1) a perception agent that detects contextual saliency maps of artifacts and editing failures, (2) a reasoning agent that interprets these perceptual cues to perform human-aligned diagnostic inference, (3) an action agent that uses the reasoning output to plan and execute localized re-editing, and (4) an evaluation agent that assesses the re-edited image and guides the action agent on whether further refinements are required. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EditRefiner consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in distortion localization, diagnose accuracy and human perception alignment, establishing a new paradigm for self-corrective and perceptually reliable image editing. The code is available at https://github.com/IntMeGroup/EditRefiner.