Image Editing As Programs with Diffusion Models
Authors: name: Yujia Hu, name: Songhua Liu, name: Zhenxiong Tan, name: Xingyi Yang, name: Xinchao Wang

While diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-image
generation, they encounter significant challenges with instruction-driven image
editing. Our research highlights a key challenge: these models particularly
struggle with structurally inconsistent edits that involve substantial layout
changes. To mitigate this gap, we introduce Image Editing As Programs (IEAP), a
unified image editing framework built upon the Diffusion Transformer (DiT)
architecture. At its core, IEAP approaches instructional editing through a
reductionist lens, decomposing complex editing instructions into sequences of
atomic operations. Each operation is implemented via a lightweight adapter
sharing the same DiT backbone and is specialized for a specific type of edit.
Programmed by a vision-language model (VLM)-based agent, these operations
collaboratively support arbitrary and structurally inconsistent
transformations. By modularizing and sequencing edits in this way, IEAP
generalizes robustly across a wide range of editing tasks, from simple
adjustments to substantial structural changes. Extensive experiments
demonstrate that IEAP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on
standard benchmarks across various editing scenarios. In these evaluations, our
framework delivers superior accuracy and semantic fidelity, particularly for
complex, multi-step instructions. Codes are available at
https://github.com/YujiaHu1109/IEAP.