EAR：用图像编辑模型探测视觉规划能力，并提出 AMAZE 基准

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Abstract:Visual planning represents a crucial facet of human intelligence, especially in tasks that require complex spatial reasoning and navigation. Yet, in machine learning, this inherently visual problem is often tackled through a verbal-centric lens. While recent research demonstrates the promise of fully visual approaches, they suffer from significant computational inefficiency due to the step-by-step planning-by-generation paradigm. In this work, we present EAR, an editing-as-reasoning paradigm that reformulates visual planning as a single-step image transformation. To isolate intrinsic reasoning from visual recognition, we employ abstract puzzles as probing tasks and introduce AMAZE, a procedurally generated dataset that features the classical Maze and Queen problems, covering distinct, complementary forms of visual planning. The abstract nature of AMAZE also facilitates automatic evaluation of autoregressive and diffusion-based models in terms of both pixel-wise fidelity and logical validity. We assess leading proprietary and open-source editing models. The results show that they all struggle in the zero-shot setting, finetuning on basic scales enables remarkable generalization to larger in-domain scales and out-of-domain scales and geometries. However, our best model that runs on high-end hardware fails to match the zero-shot efficiency of human solvers, highlighting a persistent gap in neural visual reasoning.

Comments:	Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Our code is available at this https URL
Subjects:	Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as:	arXiv:2604.22868 [cs.CV]
	(or arXiv:2604.22868v2 [cs.CV] for this version)
	https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.22868 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Zhimu Zhou [view email]
[v1] Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:00:31 UTC (10,402 KB)
[v2] Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:45:27 UTC (10,409 KB)