Inline Critic Steers Image Editing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kang, Weitai, Zhan, Xiaohang, Wang, Yizhou, Chiu, Mang Tik, Kuen, Jason, Liu, Kangning, Yan, Yan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Kang, Weitai
Zhan, Xiaohang
Wang, Yizhou
Chiu, Mang Tik
Kuen, Jason
Liu, Kangning
Yan, Yan
author_facet Kang, Weitai
Zhan, Xiaohang
Wang, Yizhou
Chiu, Mang Tik
Kuen, Jason
Liu, Kangning
Yan, Yan
contents Instruction-based image editing exhibits heterogeneous difficulty not only across cases but also across regions of an image, motivating refinement approaches that allocate correction to where the model struggles. Existing refinement signals arrive late, after a fully generated image or a completed denoising step. We ask whether such a signal can act within an ongoing forward pass. To investigate this, we probe a frozen image-editing model and find that although generation capability emerges only in the last few layers, the error pattern is already set in early layers (rank correlation \r{ho} = 0.83 with the final-layer error map). Based on this, we introduce Inline Critic, a learnable token that critiques a frozen model's predictions at its intermediate layers and steers its hidden states to refine generation during the forward pass. A three-stage recipe is proposed to stabilize the training from learning how to critique to steering generation. As a result, we achieve state of the art on GEdit-Bench (7.89), a +9.4 gain on RISEBench over the same backbone, and the strongest open-source result on KRIS-Bench (81.92, surpassing GPT-4o). We further provide analyses showing that the critic genuinely shapes the model's attention and prediction updates at subsequent layers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inline Critic Steers Image Editing
Kang, Weitai
Zhan, Xiaohang
Wang, Yizhou
Chiu, Mang Tik
Kuen, Jason
Liu, Kangning
Yan, Yan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Instruction-based image editing exhibits heterogeneous difficulty not only across cases but also across regions of an image, motivating refinement approaches that allocate correction to where the model struggles. Existing refinement signals arrive late, after a fully generated image or a completed denoising step. We ask whether such a signal can act within an ongoing forward pass. To investigate this, we probe a frozen image-editing model and find that although generation capability emerges only in the last few layers, the error pattern is already set in early layers (rank correlation \r{ho} = 0.83 with the final-layer error map). Based on this, we introduce Inline Critic, a learnable token that critiques a frozen model's predictions at its intermediate layers and steers its hidden states to refine generation during the forward pass. A three-stage recipe is proposed to stabilize the training from learning how to critique to steering generation. As a result, we achieve state of the art on GEdit-Bench (7.89), a +9.4 gain on RISEBench over the same backbone, and the strongest open-source result on KRIS-Bench (81.92, surpassing GPT-4o). We further provide analyses showing that the critic genuinely shapes the model's attention and prediction updates at subsequent layers.
title Inline Critic Steers Image Editing
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12724