VIBE: Visual Instruction Based Editor

TL;DR

VIBE introduces a compact, efficient instruction-based image editing pipeline using a 2B-parameter model guiding a 1.6B-parameter diffusion model, achieving high-quality edits with low computational cost and strict source preservation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, lightweight image editing system that matches or surpasses larger models in quality while significantly reducing inference costs and resource requirements.

Findings

Matches or exceeds performance of larger models on benchmarks

Operates within 24 GB GPU memory and 4 seconds per image

Maintains high quality and source consistency at 2K resolution

Abstract

Instruction-based image editing is among the fastest developing areas in generative AI. Over the past year, the field has reached a new level, with dozens of open-source models released alongside highly capable commercial systems. However, only a limited number of open-source approaches currently achieve real-world quality. In addition, diffusion backbones, the dominant choice for these pipelines, are often large and computationally expensive for many deployments and research settings, with widely used variants typically containing 6B to 20B parameters. This paper presents a compact, high-throughput instruction-based image editing pipeline that uses a modern 2B-parameter Qwen3-VL model to guide the editing process and the 1.6B-parameter diffusion model Sana1.5 for image generation. Our design decisions across architecture, data processing, training configuration, and evaluation target low-cost inference and strict source consistency while maintaining high quality across the major edit categories feasible at this scale. Evaluated on the ImgEdit and GEdit benchmarks, the proposed method matches or exceeds the performance of substantially heavier baselines, including models with several times as many parameters and higher inference cost, and is particularly strong on edits that require preserving the input image, such as an attribute adjustment, object removal, background edits, and targeted replacement. The model fits within 24 GB of GPU memory and generates edited images at up to 2K resolution in approximately 4 seconds on an NVIDIA H100 in BF16, without additional inference optimizations or distillation.