EditCaption: Human-Refined SFT and HAE-DPO for Image Editing Instruction Synthesis

Abstract

High-quality source-target image pairs with precise editing instructions are essential for instruction-guided image editing, yet constructing such training triplets at scale remains costly. Recent pipelines often rely on vision-language models to synthesize editing instructions automatically, but we find that strong VLMs still struggle to describe visual transformations between image pairs. In particular, they exhibit three recurring failure modes: orientation inconsistency, viewpoint ambiguity, and missing fine-grained attributes. In a human evaluation on 400 image pairs, several open-source VLM baselines produce critical-error rates above 47\%, making many synthesized instructions unsuitable for downstream training. To address this, we propose EditCaption, a two-stage post-training pipeline for image editing instruction synthesis. First, we construct a 100K supervised fine-tuning dataset through GLM-based auto-captioning, EditScore filtering, and human refinement. Second, we collect 10K human-annotated preference pairs, where each rejected instruction is labeled with its primary error type and severity. Based on this dataset, we propose Hardness-Adaptive Error-Aware DPO (HAE-DPO), a task-adapted DPO objective that introduces an adaptive margin based on human-labeled severity, failure-mode type, and reference-model hardness. Experiments across three benchmarks demonstrate that our 235B model with SFT+HAE-DPO achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source and closed models, scoring 4.720 on Eval-400, 4.672 on HQ-Edit, and 4.651 on ByteMorph-Bench -- surpassing Gemini-3-Pro on all three. Human evaluation confirms critical error rates drop from 47.75\% to 17.50\%, with correct rates improving from 41.75\% to 70.25\%, surpassing Gemini-3-Pro (66.00\%).