Ayush Roy
2026
SMART-Editor: A Multi-Agent Framework for Human-Like Design Editing with Structural Integrity
Ishani Mondal | Meera Bharadwaj | Ayush Roy | Aparna Garimella | Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Ishani Mondal | Meera Bharadwaj | Ayush Roy | Aparna Garimella | Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Despite significant progress in natural image editing with state-of-the-art MLLMs, compositional layout and content editing for structured visual domains (e.g., posters, websites) remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce SMART-EDITOR, a multi-agent framework for compositional editing for structured images like posters or websites. Unlike prior models that focus on isolated local edits, SMART-EDITOR maintains global coherence through two complementary strategies: Reward-Refine, an inference-time reward-guided refinement method, and RewardDPO, a training-time preference optimization approach leveraging reward-aligned layout pairs. To evaluate performance, we introduce SMARTEdit-Bench, a benchmark of cascading multi-step edit instructions that are implicit in nature yet require layout and semantic-consistency preserving reasoning about edit order to preserve spatial and semantic consistency. Both automatic and human evaluations confirm the value of reward-guided planning in producing semantically consistent and visually coherent edits, beyond what single-shot VLMs can generate.