KRIS-Bench: Benchmarking Next-Level Intelligent Image Editing Models

Xu Yang (Microsoft) · Ming-Hsuan Yang (Google / UC Merced) · Xianfang Zeng (Stepfun) · Gang Yu (Megvii Inc) · Bernt Schiele (Max Planck Institute for Informatics) · Wenbo Zhu (Opus AI Research) · Yongliang Wu (Southeast University) · Zonghui Li (Southeast University) · Xinting Hu (Nanyang Technological University) · Xinyu Ye
annotated editing instancescognitively informed lensconceptualdiagnostic benchmarkeducational theoryfactualfine-grained evaluationinstruction-based image editingknowledge plausibility metricknowledge typesknowledge-based reasoningknowledge-centric benchmarkskris-benchmulti-modal generative modelsproceduralreasoning dimensions

Recent advances in multi-modal generative models have enabled significant progress in instruction-based image editing. However, while these models produce visually plausible outputs, their capacity for knowledge-based reasoning editing tasks remains under-explored. In this paper, We introduce KRIS-Bench (Knowledge-based Reasoning in Image-editing Systems Benchmark), a diagnostic benchmark designed to assess models through a cognitively informed lens. Drawing from educational theory, KRIS-Bench categorizes editing tasks across three foundational knowledge types: Factual, Conceptual, and Procedural. Based on this taxonomy, we design 22 representative tasks spanning 7 reasoning dimensions and release 1,267 high-quality annotated editing instances. To support fine-grained evaluation, we propose a comprehensive protocol that incorporates a novel Knowledge Plausibility metric, enhanced by knowledge hints and calibrated through human studies. Empirical results on nine state-of-the-art models reveal significant gaps in reasoning performance, highlighting the need for knowledge-centric benchmarks to advance the development of intelligent image editing systems.