TransPhy: Visual In-Context Learning for Physically Grounded Image Editing

Abstract

Visual demonstrations provide a natural interface for specifying image transformations that are difficult to describe exhaustively with text. However, existing visual in-context learning (VICL) methods primarily focus on appearance-level relation transfer and provide limited support for physically grounded transformations, whose outcomes depend on material properties, geometry, object interactions, and environmental conditions. Given a source--target exemplar pair and a query image, physically grounded VICL requires a model to infer the demonstrated transformation, adapt its effects to the query-specific scene context, and preserve rule-irrelevant content. We introduce PhysVICL-74, comprising 74 physically grounded transformation rules and 5,240 source--target image pairs that form nearly 75K training and evaluation contexts. Its benchmark split separately evaluates novel-instance transfer and unseen-rule generalization. We further propose TransPhy, a framework that decomposes physically grounded VICL into physical-rule induction and transition-aligned rendering. TransPhy first predicts the demonstrated rule and an explicit query-specific target-state description, and then synthesizes the target image through token-wise mixture-of-experts adaptation, with expert routing guided by localized transition cues. Experiments show that TransPhy improves physical-rule adherence, query consistency, and unseen-rule generalization over existing visual in-context editing methods.