mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

ThinkDrag: Semantic Drag-Based Image Editing with Visual Reasoning

arXiv 2610.13316 ↗First posted 9 Oct 2026cs.CVcited by 0

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning also fits: Spatial and embodied reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Drag-based image editing provides an intuitive interface for spatially controlled image manipulation by allowing users to specify handle and target points. Existing methods have made substantial progress through optimization-based, one-step, and feed-forward formulations, but they often interpret drag instructions as geometric displacements. This limits their effectiveness when the desired edit depends on interpreting image content and inferring a plausible semantic transformation from sparse point constraints. We introduce ThinkDrag, a unified multimodal framework for drag-based image editing with visual reasoning. ThinkDrag is trained to associate point constraints with meaningful object- and scene-level transformations, and can optionally produce an explicit reasoning trace that interprets the intended edit before image generation. This reasoning trace improves interpretability, particularly for ambiguous drags. Drag Endpoint Markers, motivated by an analysis of cross-image attention, provide an explicit correspondence signal that grounds each drag in image space. To support this framework, we construct a supervised dataset of semantic drag transformations paired with reasoning traces and introduce DragBench++, a benchmark targeting challenging drag-based editing scenarios with reference edit solutions. Experiments show that ThinkDrag achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving generation quality and plausibility while maintaining competitive point-following precision.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 49 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2026.

Builds on

49 of 57 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Uni-cot: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Vision7 Aug
  2. 2025Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey16 Mar
  3. 2024Visual CoT: Advancing Multi-Modal Language Models with a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning25 Mar

Other references · 46

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,177
  3. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  4. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
  5. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,869
  6. 2023Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 4,418
  7. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  8. 2023Qwen Technical Reportcited by 3,344
  9. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  10. 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,611
  11. 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,431
  12. 2021SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 1,937
34 more
  1. 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 1,044
  2. 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 1,006
  3. 2024Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Modelscited by 927
  4. 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 897
  5. 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 812
  6. 2024Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Needcited by 781
  7. 2024Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 752
  8. 2024Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Modelcited by 483
  9. 2024Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 457
  10. 2023Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusioncited by 446
  11. 2023DragDiffusion: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Interactive Point-based Image Editingcited by 294
  12. 2025Z-Image: An Efficient Image Generation Foundation Model with Single-Stream Diffusion Transformercited by 277
  13. 2025Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 250
  14. 2023Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifoldcited by 219
  15. 2023DragonDiffusion: Enabling Drag-style Manipulation on Diffusion Modelscited by 195
  16. 2024Mixture-of-Transformers: A Sparse and Scalable Architecture for Multi-Modal Foundation Modelscited by 163
  17. 2025Mogao: An Omni Foundation Model for Interleaved Multi-Modal Generationcited by 109
  18. 2023The Blessing of Randomness: SDE Beats ODE in General Diffusion-based Image Editingcited by 62
  19. 2024Drag Your Noise: Interactive Point-based Editing via Diffusion Semantic Propagationcited by 51
  20. 2024GoodDrag: Towards Good Practices for Drag Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 34
  21. 2024RegionDrag: Fast Region-Based Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 32
  22. 2024InstantDrag: Improving Interactivity in Drag-based Image Editingcited by 31
  23. 2023FreeDrag: Feature Dragging for Reliable Point-based Image Editingcited by 29
  24. 2024FastDrag: Manipulate Anything in One Stepcited by 21
  25. 2024LightningDrag: Lightning Fast and Accurate Drag-based Image Editing Emerging from Videoscited by 19
  26. 2024DragText: Rethinking Text Embedding in Point-based Image Editingcited by 13
  27. 2024CLIPDrag: Combining Text-based and Drag-based Instructions for Image Editingcited by 13
  28. 2025DragLoRA: Online Optimization of LoRA Adapters for Drag-based Image Editing in Diffusion Modelcited by 9
  29. 2024Localize, Understand, Collaborate: Semantic-Aware Dragging via Intention Reasonercited by 8
  30. 2026Re-Align: Structured Reasoning-guided Alignment for In-Context Image Generation and Editingcited by 8
  31. 2025Inpaint4Drag: Repurposing Inpainting Models for Drag-Based Image Editing via Bidirectional Warpingcited by 7
  32. 2025DragNeXt: Rethinking Drag-Based Image Editingcited by 6
  33. 2025Dragging with Geometry: From Pixels to Geometry-Guided Image Editingcited by 5
  34. 2025LazyDrag: Enabling Stable Drag-Based Editing on Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers via Explicit Correspondencecited by 4

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  1. 2026Drag as Evidence: Motion-Grounded Latent Recomposition for Drag-Based Editing
  2. 2024AdaptiveDrag: Semantic-Driven Dragging on Diffusion-Based Image Editing
  3. 2024StableDrag: Stable Dragging for Point-based Image Editing
  4. 2025InstructUDrag: Joint Text Instructions and Object Dragging for Interactive Image Editing
  5. 2025DragFlow: Unleashing DiT Priors with Region Based Supervision for Drag Editing
  6. 2026Reproducing DragDiffusion: Interactive Point-Based Editing with Diffusion Models
  7. 2024EVLM: Self-Reflective Multimodal Reasoning for Cross-Dimensional Visual Editing
  8. 2026In-context Region-based Drag: Drag Any Region to Any Shape