Release, Don't Redraw: Instruction-Conditioned Release Control for Long-Horizon Multi-Turn Image Editing

Real-world image editing is often multi-turn, yet recursively applying an editor can resynthesize unrelated content, causing identity drift, overwritten edits, and lost objects. We introduce ReleaseEdit, a training-free framework that inherits the accepted image and releases only content causally implicated by the current instruction. An instruction-conditioned contract separates proposal formation from acceptance. It uses evidence- and carrier-aware localized release for subject editing, prospective creation evidence with audited generation-as-commit for object addition, and boundary-aware entity transport for background replacement. Under localized acceptance, unreleased content is directly inherited rather than indiscriminately regenerated, and the accepted output becomes the sole persistent state for the next turn. On 400 six-turn sequences (2,400 edits), ReleaseEdit outperforms five baselines in average CLIP-T (0.3318), CLIP-Dir (0.1173), CLIP-I (0.9142), and DINO-I (0.8049), and remains best at Turn 6. It ranks first in 73.75% of 640 blinded comparisons, versus 18.91% for the strongest baseline. Ten-turn comparisons further illustrate reduced qualitative drift while preserving current-turn editability.