mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

SpatialFlow-GRPO: Where Spatial Credit Drives Image Editing

arXiv 2606.26872 ↗First posted 25 Jun 2026cs.CVcited by 2

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reinforcement learning for reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Recent online reinforcement learning has substantially improved image editing quality. However, existing Flow-GRPO-style methods usually rely on a single whole-image reward, which makes fine-grained editing optimization difficult. We observe that a key obstacle in image editing is this spatial uniformity assumption: a whole-image reward cannot distinguish how different spatial regions contribute to image quality. To address this issue, we propose SpatialFlow-GRPO, a training framework that introduces spatially fine-grained reward feedback. The framework converts region-aware rewards into semantic-region-level optimization signals and aligns region advantages with the corresponding latent positions during policy updates. We also train a region-aware reward model, SFReward, construct SFReward-14K with region-annotated editing samples, and introduce MultiEditBench to evaluate multi-region editing ability. On OmniGen2 and FLUX.2-klein-4B, SpatialFlow-GRPO outperforms Flow-GRPO on GEdit-Bench, ImgEdit-Bench, and MultiEditBench. The results show that SpatialFlow-GRPO converts local feedback into spatially aligned update signals and improves editing quality.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 32 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2026.

Builds on

32 of 51 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025DanceGRPO: Unleashing GRPO on Visual Generation12 May
  2. 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL8 May
  3. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale18 Mar
  4. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms20 Jul

Other references · 28

  1. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  2. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,380
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  4. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
  5. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  6. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  7. 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,431
  8. 2015High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimationcited by 2,026
  9. 2021SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 1,937
  10. 2023Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learningcited by 982
  11. 2023Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 890
  12. 2022DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidancecited by 647
16 more
  1. 2025Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editingcited by 429
  2. 2025OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generationcited by 253
  3. 2025ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmarkcited by 231
  4. 2023VIEScore: Towards Explainable Metrics for Conditional Image Synthesis Evaluationcited by 201
  5. 2024HQ-Edit: A High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editingcited by 193
  6. 2023Guiding Instruction-based Image Editing via Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 185
  7. 2025EditScore: Unlocking Online RL for Image Editing via High-Fidelity Reward Modelingcited by 64
  8. 2025EditReward: A Human-Aligned Reward Model for Instruction-Guided Image Editingcited by 62
  9. 2024SeedEdit: Align Image Re-Generation to Image Editingcited by 61
  10. 2025Multimodal RewardBench 2: Evaluating Omni Reward Models for Interleaved Text and Imagecited by 20
  11. 2024InstructRL4Pix: Training Diffusion for Image Editing by Reinforcement Learningcited by 7
  12. 2025ImageDoctor: Diagnosing Text-to-Image Generation via Grounded Image Reasoningcited by 7
  13. 2026SpatialReward: Bridging the Perception Gap in Online RL for Image Editing via Explicit Spatial Reasoningcited by 7
  14. 2026HP-Edit: A Human-Preference Post-Training Framework for Image Editingcited by 6
  15. 2024ParallelEdits: Efficient Multi-object Image Editingcited by 3
  16. 2026Joint Reward Modeling: Internalizing Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Visual Reward Modelscited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Region-Constrained Group Relative Policy Optimization for Flow-Based Image Editing
  2. 2026Edit-GRPO: A Locality-Preserving Policy Optimization Framework for Image Editing
  3. 2026MT-EditFlow: Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Image Editing with Flow Matching
  4. 2026SGA-Flow-GRPO: Spatial Gradient-Guided Credit Assignment for Flow-GRPO
  5. 2026Leveraging Verifier-Based Reinforcement Learning in Image Editing
  6. 2026CoCoEdit: Content-Consistent Image Editing via Region Regularized Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2026Can We Perform Online RL for Image Editing without Editing Rewards?
  8. 2025Training-Free Reward-Guided Image Editing via Trajectory Optimal Control