Balancing Preservation and Modification: A Region and Semantic Aware Metric for Instruction-Based Image Editing

Zhuoying Li, Zhu Xu, Yuxin Peng, Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 267:36576-36596, 2025.

Abstract

Instruction-based image editing, which aims to modify the image faithfully towards instruction while preserving irrelevant content unchanged, has made advanced progresses. However, there still lacks a comprehensive metric for assessing the editing quality. Existing metrics either require high costs concerning human evaluation, which hinders large-scale evaluation, or adapt from other tasks and lose specified concerns, failing to comprehensively evaluate the modification of instruction and the preservation of irrelevant regions, resulting in biased evaluation. To tackle it, we introduce a new metric Balancing Preservation Modification (BPM), that tailored for instruction-based image editing by explicitly disentangling the image into editing-relevant and irrelevant regions for specific consideration. We first identify and locate editing-relevant regions, followed by a two-tier process to assess editing quality: Region-Aware Judge evaluates whether the position and size of the edited region align with instruction, and Semantic-Aware Judge further assesses the instruction content compliance within editing-relevant regions as well as content preservation within irrelevant regions, yielding comprehensive and interpretable quality assessment. Moreover, the editing-relevant region localization in BPM can be integrated into image editing approaches to improve the editing quality, manifesting its wild application. We verify the effectiveness of BPM metric on comprehensive instruction-editing data, and the re- sults show that we yield the highest alignment with human evaluation compared to existing metrics, indicating efficacy. The code is available at https://joyli-x.github.io/BPM/.

Cite this Paper


BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v267-li25dh, title = {Balancing Preservation and Modification: A Region and Semantic Aware Metric for Instruction-Based Image Editing}, author = {Li, Zhuoying and Xu, Zhu and Peng, Yuxin and Liu, Yang}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {36576--36596}, year = {2025}, editor = {Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry}, volume = {267}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {13--19 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v267/main/assets/li25dh/li25dh.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/li25dh.html}, abstract = {Instruction-based image editing, which aims to modify the image faithfully towards instruction while preserving irrelevant content unchanged, has made advanced progresses. However, there still lacks a comprehensive metric for assessing the editing quality. Existing metrics either require high costs concerning human evaluation, which hinders large-scale evaluation, or adapt from other tasks and lose specified concerns, failing to comprehensively evaluate the modification of instruction and the preservation of irrelevant regions, resulting in biased evaluation. To tackle it, we introduce a new metric Balancing Preservation Modification (BPM), that tailored for instruction-based image editing by explicitly disentangling the image into editing-relevant and irrelevant regions for specific consideration. We first identify and locate editing-relevant regions, followed by a two-tier process to assess editing quality: Region-Aware Judge evaluates whether the position and size of the edited region align with instruction, and Semantic-Aware Judge further assesses the instruction content compliance within editing-relevant regions as well as content preservation within irrelevant regions, yielding comprehensive and interpretable quality assessment. Moreover, the editing-relevant region localization in BPM can be integrated into image editing approaches to improve the editing quality, manifesting its wild application. We verify the effectiveness of BPM metric on comprehensive instruction-editing data, and the re- sults show that we yield the highest alignment with human evaluation compared to existing metrics, indicating efficacy. The code is available at https://joyli-x.github.io/BPM/.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Balancing Preservation and Modification: A Region and Semantic Aware Metric for Instruction-Based Image Editing %A Zhuoying Li %A Zhu Xu %A Yuxin Peng %A Yang Liu %B Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2025 %E Aarti Singh %E Maryam Fazel %E Daniel Hsu %E Simon Lacoste-Julien %E Felix Berkenkamp %E Tegan Maharaj %E Kiri Wagstaff %E Jerry Zhu %F pmlr-v267-li25dh %I PMLR %P 36576--36596 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/li25dh.html %V 267 %X Instruction-based image editing, which aims to modify the image faithfully towards instruction while preserving irrelevant content unchanged, has made advanced progresses. However, there still lacks a comprehensive metric for assessing the editing quality. Existing metrics either require high costs concerning human evaluation, which hinders large-scale evaluation, or adapt from other tasks and lose specified concerns, failing to comprehensively evaluate the modification of instruction and the preservation of irrelevant regions, resulting in biased evaluation. To tackle it, we introduce a new metric Balancing Preservation Modification (BPM), that tailored for instruction-based image editing by explicitly disentangling the image into editing-relevant and irrelevant regions for specific consideration. We first identify and locate editing-relevant regions, followed by a two-tier process to assess editing quality: Region-Aware Judge evaluates whether the position and size of the edited region align with instruction, and Semantic-Aware Judge further assesses the instruction content compliance within editing-relevant regions as well as content preservation within irrelevant regions, yielding comprehensive and interpretable quality assessment. Moreover, the editing-relevant region localization in BPM can be integrated into image editing approaches to improve the editing quality, manifesting its wild application. We verify the effectiveness of BPM metric on comprehensive instruction-editing data, and the re- sults show that we yield the highest alignment with human evaluation compared to existing metrics, indicating efficacy. The code is available at https://joyli-x.github.io/BPM/.
APA
Li, Z., Xu, Z., Peng, Y. & Liu, Y.. (2025). Balancing Preservation and Modification: A Region and Semantic Aware Metric for Instruction-Based Image Editing. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 267:36576-36596 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/li25dh.html.

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