# CoT-Edit: Let CoT Guide Instruction Video Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01113 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01113/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04145/) (2023)
- [Video-P2P: Video Editing with Cross-attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04761/) (2023)
- [Follow Your Pose: Pose-Guided Text-to-Video Generation using Pose-Free Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01186/) (2023)
- [StyleGAN-V: A Continuous Video Generator with the Price, Image Quality and Perks of StyleGAN2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14683/) (2021)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01558/) (2021)
- [AnyV2V: A Tuning-Free Framework For Any Video-to-Video Editing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14468/) (2024)
- [Koala-36M: A Large-scale Video Dataset Improving Consistency between Fine-grained Conditions and Video Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08260/) (2024)
- [PhraseCut: Language-based Image Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01187/) (2020)
- [SEED-Data-Edit Technical Report: A Hybrid Dataset for Instructional Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04007/) (2024)
- [HunyuanCustom: A Multimodal-Driven Architecture for Customized Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04512/) (2025)
- [Consistent Video-to-Video Transfer Using Synthetic Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00213/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Based Video Editing with a High-Quality Synthetic Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15742/) (2025)
- [AnyEdit: Edit Any Knowledge Encoded in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05628/) (2025)
- [HunyuanVideo-Avatar: High-Fidelity Audio-Driven Human Animation for Multiple Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20156/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [GRNEdit: Efficient General Video Editing from a New Binary-Evidence Perspective in Generative Refinement Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16328/) (2026)
- [MSEditor: Toward Consistent Multi-Shot Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17559/) (2026)
- [RefVideo-6M: A Reliable Reference-Based Dataset for Instructional Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26101/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-driven instruction-based video editing in complex scenes remains challenging: purely textual prompts often fail to capture precise spatial relationships and physical constraints, resulting in target ambiguity and physically implausible outcomes. To address this, we propose a plan--guide--edit framework that explicitly bridges semantic intent and spatial execution. In our framework, a Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-enhanced multimodal large language model (MLLM) serves as a planner, performing structured reasoning over the video and instructions to derive a precise sequence of bounding boxes and attribute-enriched editing directives. These spatial priors then guide a box-conditioned mask generator, transforming ambiguous global retrieval into localized, context-aware refinement and producing masks that more accurately capture object scale, contact relationships, and placement. Building on these spatial and semantic signals, a diffusion-based editor integrates the masks, enriched instructions, and frame features to render high-fidelity edits that remain temporally coherent and spatially well aligned. Trained first in a modular manner and then jointly, our framework achieves superior performance with reduced data requirements, delivering precise localization in scenes with multiple similar objects and physically consistent object additions, and extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance over multiple strong baseline methods. More details are available at: https://github.com/flying-sky999/CoT-Edit