Preserve or Modify? Context-Aware Evaluation for Balancing Preservation and Modification in Text-Guided Image Editing

The development of vision-language and generative models has significantly advanced text-guided image editing, which seeks the preservation of core elements in the source image while implementing modifications based on the target text. However, existing metrics have a context-blindness problem, which is indiscriminately applying the same criteria on completely different contexts and biasing towards either modification or preservation. Directional CLIP similarity, the only metric that considers both source image and target text, is also biased towards modification aspects and attends to irrelevant editing regions of the image. We propose AugCLIP, a context-aware metric that adaptively coordinates preservation and modification aspects, depending on the specific context of a given source image and target text. This is done by deriving the CLIP representation of an ideally edited image, that preserves the source image with necessary modifications to align with target text. More specifically, using a multi-modal large language model, AugCLIP generates detailed textual descriptions of the source and target, then calculates a modification vector through a hyperplane in CLIP space that separates source and target attributes. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, encompassing a diverse range of editing scenarios, show that AugCLIP aligns remarkably well with human evaluation standards, outperforming existing metrics. The code will be open-sourced for community use.