InfoEdit: Probing Global Layout Reasoning in Infographic Editing

Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Huijuan Wang, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Yibo Yan, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick


Abstract
Multimodal foundation models edit natural photographs at production quality, yet the same models struggle with structured visual content such as infographics. Unlike photographs, infographics encode information through logical relations; editing one element often requires surrounding elements to be adapted. We refer to this global layout reasoning capability as reflow. Existing image-editing benchmarks neither provide a dedicated setting for structured visual content nor evaluate the reflow capability. We introduce InfoEdit, a novel benchmark of 1,000 infographics across eight logical-relation families, paired with 4,000 editing instructions across four editing tasks, and a reflow-aware evaluation protocol. Across eight frontier editors, only GPT-Image-2 clears 60% average success rate; most models fall below 7%, and no editor exceeds 36% on Swap-Block task even with perfect target localization. We further show that code-level editing can match the strongest pixel-level editor, revealing complementary strengths across tasks. InfoEdit identifies reflow as a central challenge in structured visual content editing and provides a diagnostic benchmark to facilitate future progress.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2513
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
57130–57168
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2513/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Huijuan Wang, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Yibo Yan, Xuezhe Ma, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. 2026. InfoEdit: Probing Global Layout Reasoning in Infographic Editing. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 57130–57168, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
InfoEdit: Probing Global Layout Reasoning in Infographic Editing (Yang et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2513.pdf