ICML2026
World-Shaper: A Unified Framework for 360° Panoramic Editing
Dong Liang, yuhao liu, Jinyuan Jia, Youjun Zhao, Rynson W Lau
Abstract
Being able to edit panoramic images is crucial for creating realistic 360° visual experiences. However, existing perspective-based image editing methods fail to model the spatial structure of panoramas. Conventional cube-map decompositions attempt to overcome this problem but inevitably break global consistency due to their mismatch with spherical geometry. Motivated by this insight, we reformulate panoramic editing directly in the equirectangular projection (ERP) domain and present World Shaper, a unified geometry-aware framework that supports five distinct editing operations within a single ERP-native representation. To address the latitude-dependent geometric distortion inherent in ERP, we introduce a geometry-aware learning strategy comprising distortion-aware attention modulation (DAAM), which steers cross-attention with latitude-dependent strength at the feature level; layered shape loss (LSL), which enforces per-object geometric supervision at the output level; and progressive curriculum training to internalize panoramic priors. To overcome the scarcity of paired panoramic editing data, we train a dedicated ERP-native controllable generator that synthesizes objects directly in the equirectangular domain under user-defined conditions, enabling scalable paired data construction for learning diverse editing behaviors. Extensive experiments on our new benchmark, PEBench, demonstrate that World Shaper achieves superior geometric consistency, editing fidelity, and text controllability compared to state-of-the-art methods, enabling coherent and flexible 360° visual world creation with unified editing control. Code, models, and data are available at the project page: https://world-shaper-project.github.io/.