Zijin Yin

Runze He, Yiji Cheng, Tiankai Hang et al.

In-context image generation and editing (ICGE) enables users to specify visual concepts through interleaved image-text prompts, demanding precise understanding and faithful execution of user intent. Although recent unified multimodal models exhibit promising understanding capabilities, these strengths often fail to transfer effectively to image generation. We introduce Re-Align, a unified framework that bridges the gap between understanding and generation through structured reasoning-guided alignment. At its core lies the In-Context Chain-of-Thought (IC-CoT), a structured reasoning paradigm that decouples semantic guidance and reference association, providing clear textual target and mitigating confusion among reference images. Furthermore, Re-Align introduces an effective RL training scheme that leverages a surrogate reward to measure the alignment between structured reasoning text and the generated image, thereby improving the model's overall performance on ICGE tasks. Extensive experiments verify that Re-Align outperforms competitive methods of comparable model scale and resources on both in-context image generation and editing tasks.

Zijin Yin, Tiankai Hang, Yiji Cheng et al.

Existing image editing methods struggle to perceive where to edit, especially under complex scenes and nuanced spatial instructions. To address this issue, we propose Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought (GVCoT), a unified framework that performs native visual reasoning by first generating spatial cues to localize the target region and then executing the edit. Unlike prior text-only CoT or tool-dependent visual CoT paradigms, GVCoT jointly optimizes visual tokens generated during the reasoning and editing phases in an end-to-end manner. This way fosters the emergence of innate spatial reasoning ability and enables more effective utilization of visual-domain cues. The main challenge of training GCVoT lies in the scarcity of large-scale editing data with precise edit region annotations; to this end, we construct GVCoT-Edit-Instruct, a dataset of 1.8M high-quality samples spanning 19 tasks. We adopt a progressive training strategy: supervised fine-tuning to build foundational localization ability in reasoning trace before final editing, followed by reinforcement learning to further improve reasoning and editing quality. Finally, we introduce SREdit-Bench, a new benchmark designed to comprehensively stress-test models under sophisticated scenes and fine-grained referring expressions. Experiments demonstrate that GVCoT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models on SREdit-Bench and ImgEdit. We hope our GVCoT will inspire future research toward interpretable and precise image editing.

Yu Xu, Hongbin Yan, Juan Cao et al.

Unified image generation and editing models suffer from severe task interference in dense diffusion transformers architectures, where a shared parameter space must compromise between conflicting objectives (e.g., local editing v.s. subject-driven generation). While the sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm is a promising solution, its gating networks remain task-agnostic, operating based on local features, unaware of global task intent. This task-agnostic nature prevents meaningful specialization and fails to resolve the underlying task interference. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to inject semantic intent into MoE routing. We introduce a Hierarchical Task Semantic Annotation scheme to create structured task descriptors (e.g., scope, type, preservation). We then design Predictive Alignment Regularization to align internal routing decisions with the task's high-level semantics. This regularization evolves the gating network from a task-agnostic executor to a dispatch center. Our model effectively mitigates task interference, outperforming dense baselines in fidelity and quality, and our analysis shows that experts naturally develop clear and semantically correlated specializations.

Zijin Yin, Bing Li, Kongming Liang et al.

Semantic segmentation takes pivotal roles in various applications such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. When deploying segmentation models in practice, it is critical to test their behaviors in varied and complex scenes in advance. In this paper, we construct an automatic data generation pipeline Gen4Seg to stress-test semantic segmentation models by generating various challenging samples with different attribute changes. Beyond previous evaluation paradigms focusing solely on global weather and style transfer, we investigate variations in both appearance and geometry attributes at the object and image level. These include object color, material, size, position, as well as image-level variations such as weather and style. To achieve this, we propose to edit visual attributes of existing real images with precise control of structural information, empowered by diffusion models. In this way, the existing segmentation labels can be reused for the edited images, which greatly reduces the labor costs. Using our pipeline, we construct two new benchmarks, Pascal-EA and COCO-EA. We benchmark a wide variety of semantic segmentation models, spanning from closed-set models to open-vocabulary large models. We have several key findings: 1) advanced open-vocabulary models do not exhibit greater robustness compared to closed-set methods under geometric variations; 2) data augmentation techniques, such as CutOut and CutMix, are limited in enhancing robustness against appearance variations; 3) our pipeline can also be employed as a data augmentation tool and improve both in-distribution and out-of-distribution performances. Our work suggests the potential of generative models as effective tools for automatically analyzing segmentation models, and we hope our findings will assist practitioners and researchers in developing more robust and reliable segmentation models.