Specify and Edit: Overcoming Ambiguity in Text-Based Image Editing

Text-based editing diffusion models exhibit limited performance when the user’s input instruction is ambiguous. To solve this problem, we propose Specify ANd Edit (SANE), a zero-shot inference pipeline for diffusion-based editing systems. We use a large language model (LLM) to decompose the input instruction into specific instructions, i.e. well-defined interventions to apply to the input image to satisfy the user’s request. We benefit from the LLM-derived instructions along the original one, thanks to a novel denoising guidance strategy specifically designed for the task. Our experiments with three baselines and on two datasets demonstrate the benefits of SANE in all setups. Moreover, our pipeline improves the interpretability of editing models, and boosts the output diversity. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/fabvio/SANE.

Recommended citation: E. Iakovleva, F. Pizzati, P. Torr and S. Lathuilière. "Specify and Edit: Overcoming Ambiguity in Text-Based Image Editing." In BMVC'25.
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