Source-linked AI summary

Agentic Image Generation in the Wild

Yifan Li, Bowen Qin, Kun Zhou, Haochen Zhao, Zikang Liu, Zheng Li, Minsheng Hao, Yuhao Cheng, Haosheng Zou, Jeff Chen, Wayne Xin Zhao

arXiv:2610.23269v1cs.CV

TL;DR

Newly introduced targets make real-world agentic image generation difficult because visual evidence is limited, search results are crowded, and references may include distractions. The paper builds a headline-driven benchmark and trains Ranger-8B on Locate-Corroborate-Isolate trajectories; it reports a 67.2 search score and the best generation quality with every tested generator.

  • Problem

    Newly introduced targets have limited visual records, crowded search results, and images entangled with distractions, making them difficult to identify and reference in real-world agentic image generation.

    Source: §1 · p. 1, §2.1 · p. 3
  • Method

    The paper builds a headline-driven prompt pipeline and trains Ranger-8B on 15K trajectories following the Locate-Corroborate-Isolate paradigm.

    Source: §1 · pp. 1–2
  • Results

    67.2 search score, up from 51.5, with the best generation quality for every tested generator and better results than prior agentic methods on other representative benchmarks.

    Source: §5 · p. 10
  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The authors’ analysis finds that each Locate-Corroborate-Isolate phase addresses its intended challenge.

    Source: §5 · p. 10

Abstract

from arXiv · show

Agentic image generation pairs an image generator with a search agent that retrieves references from the web, extending generation beyond the generator's training data. Real-world requests, however, often concern entities that appeared only days ago. We call this setting Image Generation in the Wild. In this setting, the web offers limited visual evidence, search results are crowded with easily confused entities, and the target is rarely shown on its own. To study this setting, we build an automated pipeline that synthesizes prompts from recent headlines and keeps only those whose real search results are highly confusing, yielding requests that are hard to solve yet natural to ask. With it, we construct Savanna, a benchmark of 500 prompts across 16 subcategories. On Savanna, even harness frameworks built on the frontier models retrieve a correct reference for only about half of the prompts. We then propose Locate-Corroborate-Isolate, a paradigm in which the agent first pins down the target's identity through text search, then verifies candidate images against multiple sources, and finally crops a clean reference for the generator. Trained on 15K trajectories that follow this paradigm, Ranger-8B achieves a search score of 67.2, outperforming harnesses equipped with frontier models. It also achieves the best generation quality with every generator we test, and surpasses prior agentic methods on other image generation benchmarks. We release the pipeline, benchmark, training data and model at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Agentic-ImageGen-Wild.

1 INTRODUCTION

Image generation in the wild combines newly introduced targets with scarce, confusing, and entangled visual evidence. The paper builds a headline-driven benchmark and trains an agentic paradigm that improves retrieval and generation results.

1 INTRODUCTION

  • The setting poses three challenges: temporal novelty limits visual records, semantic crowding returns confusing entities, and spatial entanglement puts targets amid distractions.These conditions make it harder to confirm an entity’s appearance and select a clean reference.Source: §1 · p. 1
  • The authors propose a news-driven pipeline for synthesizing prompts and a Locate-Corroborate-Isolate paradigm that identifies targets, checks candidate images, and crops clean references when needed.The pipeline restricts searches to results published within three days of each article and can continue producing prompts as news arrives.Source: §1 · pp. 1–2
  • Even harnesses built on the latest frontier models reach a search score of at most 51.5 on Savanna.Savanna contains 500 prompts across 16 subcategories, and all evaluated systems struggle on it.Source: §1 · p. 2
  • 67.2 search score, 15.7 points above the strongest baseline, and the best generation score with every tested generator; Ranger-8B also surpasses prior agentic methods on Mind-Bench and KnowGen.Ranger-8B was fine-tuned on 15K trajectories following Locate-Corroborate-Isolate.Source: §1 · p. 2

2 SAVANNA: IS IMAGE GENERATION READY FOR THE REAL WORLD?

This section formulates image generation in the wild, describes a news-driven pipeline for constructing difficult prompts, and presents Savanna and its evaluation measures.

2.1 TASK FORMULATION

  • Newly introduced entities face temporal novelty, semantic crowding, and spatial entanglement: limited image evidence, confusing search results, and references cluttered with other objects.A correct image may still be unsuitable when it includes distractions the generator could reproduce.Source: §2.1 · p. 3

2.2 FROM HEADLINES TO HARD PROMPTS

  • The pipeline builds time-bounded world snapshots from recent news, then extracts visually identifiable entities from text or retrieves unmentioned objects in images to introduce spatial entanglement.Subsequent searches are restricted to results published no later than three days after the news date.Source: §2.2 · pp. 3–4
  • Queries are filtered for confusion and cross-checked for a single answer; a VLM selects or crops a reference, then writes a prompt and evaluation rubrics.The pipeline keeps queries with κ(u) ≥ 0.5 and discards those with no matching entity group or multiple groups.Source: §2.2 · p. 4

2.3 BENCHMARK CURATION

  • Savanna contains 500 July 2026 prompts across five domains and 16 subcategories, reviewed for one correct answer; search and generation scores separately assess reference match and image fidelity and context.Three PhD-level annotators independently review each sample.Source: §2.3 · p. 5

3 RANGER: LEADING IMAGE GENERATION THROUGH THE WILD

Ranger pairs a three-step search process with a VLM agent trained on vetted teacher trajectories. The process establishes the target from text, corroborates candidate images, and isolates a clean reference for generation.

3.1 LOCATE, CORROBORATE, ISOLATE: SURVIVING THE WILD IN THREE STEPS

  • Locate uses text search and web fetching to gather distinguishing facts that refine image queries and guide candidate evaluation.The environment also provides image search and crop-image tools.Source: §3.1 · p. 5
  • Corroborate checks candidate pixels, titles, and source pages against gathered facts, then checks whether multiple images show the same entity.If candidates are absent or evenly matched, the agent returns to Locate for more context and a more distinctive query.Source: §3.1 · p. 6
  • Isolate selects the verified image that best matches the prompt and crops the target when other objects share its frame.The resulting crop is passed to the generator with the refined prompt.Source: §3.1 · p. 6

3.2 LEARNING FROM TEACHER TRAJECTORIES

  • 15,119 vetted teacher trajectories, disjoint in time from Savanna, form Ranger-15K for training Ranger-8B.Trajectories with incorrect references, dropped prompt conditions, or uninformative repeated searches are discarded; inference is limited to 8 tool calls and 5 images per search.Source: §3.2 · pp. 6–7

4 EXPERIMENTS

Ranger-8B outperforms frontier-model harnesses on Savanna and generalizes to Mind-Bench and KnowGen. Further analyses find that Locate, Corroborate, and Isolate each address their intended challenge.

4.1 EVALUATION SETUP

  • Evaluation covers Savanna with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Nano Banana Pro, plus Mind-Bench and KnowGen for generalization; baselines span four system families.Table 2 reports results on Mind-Bench and KnowGen and marks best and second-best scores among open-source methods.Source: §4.1 · p. 7, Table 2 · p. 8

4.2 MAIN RESULTS ON SAVANNA

  • Existing methods pass only about half of Savanna prompts with a correct reference; no baseline exceeds 40 in Fashion, and proprietary systems score at most 34.9 on generation.These results expose difficulty finding targets on a crowded, evolving web.Source: §4.2 · p. 8
  • Generation is bounded by reference quality: Nano Banana Pro scores 26.1 with its own search but 58.9 with Ranger's references.Fashion, where Ranger improves search most, also has its largest generation gains: 16.9 and 21.0 points with the two generators.Source: §4.2 · p. 8
  • With 8B parameters, Ranger raises the search score from 51.5 to 67.2 and achieves the best generation score in every domain with both generators.It also leads Gen-Searcher and GenEvolve by more than 20 search points.Source: §4.2 · p. 8

4.3 GENERALIZATION PERFORMANCE

  • Despite training only on news-driven data, Ranger achieves the best overall score among agentic methods on Mind-Bench and KnowGen, beating each benchmark's proposer on its own benchmark.Scores are 28.2 vs. 15.8 on Mind-Bench and 27.75 vs. 26.35 on KnowGen.Source: §4.3 · p. 8, Table 2 · p. 8

4.4 FURTHER ANALYSIS

  • Ranger's first image search reaches Recall@4 of 71.7, versus 54.4 and 66.0 for direct-query baselines, supporting Locate's text-first search.Figure 5 compares Recall@4 for the first image search of direct query and Ranger.Source: §4.4 · p. 9, Figure 5 · p. 9
  • Ranger leads by at least 16 search-score points in every retrieval-confusion group, including the most confusing group, where it scores 56.4 versus 39.7 and 40.4.Figure 6 groups search score by retrieval confusion.Source: §4.4 · p. 9, Figure 6 · p. 9
  • On 102 prompts where Ranger calls for cropping, identity score rises by 6.3 points with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and 3.8 with Nano Banana Pro; context score rises by 1.4 and 1.3.The authors report that cropping removes surrounding content while preserving the requested context.Source: §4.4 · p. 9

5 CONCLUSION

The paper studies agentic image generation for newly introduced entities, where targets are hard to find and isolate on the live web. It presents Savanna and Locate-Corroborate-Isolate, with Ranger-8B improving search and generation results.

5 CONCLUSION

  • The conclusion identifies temporal novelty, semantic crowding, and spatial entanglement as challenges, and reports that frontier-model harnesses find a correct reference for only about half of Savanna cases.Savanna is constructed from a news-driven pipeline intended to reproduce these challenges under real search conditions.Source: §5 · p. 9
  • Ranger-8B raises the search score from 51.5 to 67.2, achieves the best generation quality with every tested generator, and surpasses prior agentic methods on other representative benchmarks.The authors report that their analysis confirms each paradigm phase addresses its intended challenge.Source: §5 · p. 10

A RELATED WORK

  • Unlike fixed-database retrieval, the paper obtains references from the live web while keeping the generator fixed.The related-work discussion notes that fixed databases cannot cover entities introduced after they were built.Source: A RELATED WORK · p. 12
  • Ranger crops images to prepare the generator's input, whereas prior multimodal agents crop regions for closer inspection and end with a text answer.Savanna targets distinguishing newly introduced entities from similar ones and isolating them into clean references.Source: A RELATED WORK · p. 12

B TOOL IMPLEMENTATIONS

The agent environment uses Serper search backends, while news retrieval supports data construction.

B TOOL IMPLEMENTATIONS

  • Serper supplies the search backends, and the agent receives retrieved text or image pixels through the corresponding tool interface.Table 3 distinguishes news retrieval for data construction from tools available to the agent.Source: B TOOL IMPLEMENTATIONS · p. 12, Table 3 · p. 13
  • News collection is day-by-day; subsequent searches are limited to results through three days after the news date, and results with unambiguous later timestamps are removed.Results without a usable, unambiguous date are retained.Source: B TOOL IMPLEMENTATIONS · p. 13

C META QUERIES

Savanna's meta queries name families of visual artifacts within subcategories without specifying a particular answer.

C META QUERIES

  • The 50 meta queries each name a visual-artifact family within a Savanna subcategory rather than pointing to a specific answer.Table 4 lists the meta queries by domain and subcategory.Source: C META QUERIES · p. 14, Table 4 · p. 14

D EVALUATION DETAILS AND JUDGE PROMPTS

The evaluation separates reference retrieval from generated-image identity and context, using VLM judgments against ground truth and prompt-specific criteria. The appendix also describes the judges’ inputs and the Mind-Bench and KnowGen evaluation schemes.

D EVALUATION DETAILS AND JUDGE PROMPTS

  • Search score passes only when a retrieved reference shows the correct target clearly enough to guide generation; wrong versions and unusable views fail.Viewpoint and background differences are allowed; failed rollouts and missing references count as failures, while judge errors are excluded from the denominator.Source: D EVALUATION DETAILS AND JUDGE PROMPTS · p. 14
  • Generation identity score assigns 1, 0.2, or 0 for consistent, partially consistent, or inconsistent target identity, averaging separately scored targets when prompts name several.The context score is the fraction of prompt rubrics satisfied, covering scene, relations, and other context.Source: D EVALUATION DETAILS AND JUDGE PROMPTS · p. 14

D.1 SEARCH JUDGE PROMPT

  • The search judge receives the original prompt, ground-truth image, and agent references, as specified by its system prompt.The section reproduces that system prompt in Table 5.Source: §D.1 · p. 15, Table 5 · p. 15

D.2 GENERATION JUDGE PROMPT

  • The generation judge receives the target description, prompt, context rubrics, generated image, and ground-truth images, explicitly labeled by role.Its system prompt is reproduced in Table 6.Source: §D.2 · p. 16, Table 6 · p. 16
  • Generic-category matches score 0.0, while tier 0.2 requires at least one specific identity feature to agree.Scene, background, pose, camera angle, lighting, framing, and crop do not change the identity tier; unseen features are not judged, and a cropped target can still receive 1.0 if all visible parts agree.Source: §D.2 · p. 17
  • The generation judge returns one entry per distinct named target and evaluates each context criterion from the generated image alone.It ignores ground-truth backgrounds when judging context and marks missing, wrong, illegible, or unverifiable criteria false.Source: §D.2 · p. 17

D.3 INTRODUCTION TO MINDBENCH AND KNOWGEN

  • Mind-Bench reports pass rates for Knowledge, Reasoning, and overall, requiring every item on a sample-specific checklist to be satisfied.It contains 500 prompts across ten equally sized categories.Source: §D.3 · p. 17
  • KnowGen reports visual correctness, text accuracy, prompt faithfulness, and aesthetics, with K-Score weighting them 0.4, 0.4, 0.1, and 0.1.Its 630 prompts span Science & Knowledge and Pop Culture & News; the two groups are averaged equally, with scores on a 0–100 scale.Source: §D.3 · p. 17

E PROSPECTIVE VALIDATION OF THE THREE-DAY RETRIEVAL CUTOFF

A prospective study compares early visual-reference retrieval with later retrieval and tests whether a three-day publication-date cutoff approximates the early web environment. The day-7 filtered result was close to the unfiltered day-3 result.

E PROSPECTIVE VALIDATION OF THE THREE-DAY RETRIEVAL CUTOFF

  • The synthesis pipeline treats the news date as issue time τ and limits later text and image searches to results published by τ +3 days.This date filtering is intended to approximate the web shortly after an event, when entities are temporally novel.Source: E PROSPECTIVE VALIDATION OF THE… · p. 17
  • The retrospective day-7 condition used the same fixed queries and publication cutoff, and its results were compared with unfiltered day-3 searches.Each target was queried twice in the filtered condition.Source: E PROSPECTIVE VALIDATION OF THE… · p. 18
  • 78.0% Hit@8 on day 7 with a three-day publication-date cutoff was close to 76.0% on day 3 without date filters.The comparison supports date filtering as an approximation of visual-reference retrieval shortly after an event.Source: E PROSPECTIVE VALIDATION OF THE… · p. 18, Table 7 · p. 18
  • Hit@8 rose from 68.0% within 24 hours to 76.0% on day 3 and 80.0% on day 7 for 50 prospectively tracked entities.Each entity was queried twice per condition, using the top eight results; the query was fixed at enrollment and release time verified from its initial announcement.Source: E PROSPECTIVE VALIDATION OF THE… · p. 18

F HUMAN-MODEL ALIGNMENT

The VLM evaluator closely agrees with human annotators on search and generation identity judgments, with somewhat lower agreement on context rubrics. The accompanying figures present trajectory and generation comparisons, plus a gallery of outputs.

F HUMAN-MODEL ALIGNMENT

  • 98% agreement with human annotators was reported for search judgments and generation identity judgments, versus 94.5% for context rubrics.The validation used 100 Savanna images and supports use of a strong teacher VLM to judge retrieval correctness, target identity, and contextual details.Source: F HUMAN-MODEL ALIGNMENT · p. 18, Table 8 · p. 18

G COMPARISON OF AGENT TRAJECTORIES

  • Figure 8 shows pre-generation trajectories for the same target, with colors marking grounded decisions, uncertainty, and incorrect or missing references.The independent runs omit SCOPE’s later verification and repair; ground truth is shown for comparison.Source: Figure 8 · p. 19

H QUALITATIVE GENERATION COMPARISON ON SAVANNA

  • Figure 9 compares Nano Banana Pro generations using built-in search or agent-selected references across five Savanna domains, labeling target identity on original outputs.Display crops emphasize the target; ground truth is for evaluation only.Source: Figure 9 · p. 20

I GALLERY OF GENERATED IMAGES

  • Figure 10 presents 16 Nano Banana Pro outputs from Ranger prompts and references across all five Savanna domains.Images are uncropped and shown at their original aspect ratios.Source: Figure 10 · p. 21

J EFFECT OF REFERENCE CROPPING

The figure compares full and cropped references and paired generations for two generators. In the described examples, cropping changes which target details appear in the outputs.

J EFFECT OF REFERENCE CROPPING

  • The figure labels one Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 example as the Schiaparelli face bag.Source: J EFFECT OF REFERENCE CROPPING · p. 22
  • One example prompt requests the Schiaparelli face bag Winnie Harlow carried at the 2026 World Cup on a hotel dressing table.The scene includes scattered makeup brushes and morning light.Source: J EFFECT OF REFERENCE CROPPING · p. 22
  • Figure 11 pairs user prompts and full or cropped references with generations from Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Nano Banana Pro; green boxes mark the crops.The cases support comparing each generator’s paired outputs under full versus cropped references.Source: Figure 11 · p. 22
  • Cropping the reference changed depicted details: Qwen’s Schiaparelli face bag had smaller eyes and a flatter face, while Nano Banana Pro restored the shoes’ central T-bar and horizontal straps.With the full reference, Qwen added prominent eyebrows and oversized facial features; Nano Banana Pro showed isolated side cutouts instead of the central T-bar and straps.Source: J EFFECT OF REFERENCE CROPPING · p. 22
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