mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models

arXiv 2211.09794 ↗First posted 17 Nov 2022cs.CVcited by 1,179

On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing

Abstract (arXiv)

Recent text-guided diffusion models provide powerful image generation capabilities. Currently, a massive effort is given to enable the modification of these images using text only as means to offer intuitive and versatile editing. To edit a real image using these state-of-the-art tools, one must first invert the image with a meaningful text prompt into the pretrained model's domain. In this paper, we introduce an accurate inversion technique and thus facilitate an intuitive text-based modification of the image. Our proposed inversion consists of two novel key components: (i) Pivotal inversion for diffusion models. While current methods aim at mapping random noise samples to a single input image, we use a single pivotal noise vector for each timestamp and optimize around it. We demonstrate that a direct inversion is inadequate on its own, but does provide a good anchor for our optimization. (ii) NULL-text optimization, where we only modify the unconditional textual embedding that is used for classifier-free guidance, rather than the input text embedding. This allows for keeping both the model weights and the conditional embedding intact and hence enables applying prompt-based editing while avoiding the cumbersome tuning of the model's weights. Our Null-text inversion, based on the publicly available Stable Diffusion model, is extensively evaluated on a variety of images and prompt editing, showing high-fidelity editing of real images.

Key facts. Cited by 1,179 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 42 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2022.

Builds on

42 of 51 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2022DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance20 Oct
  2. 2022Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models17 Oct
  3. 2022DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation25 Aug
  4. 2022Blended Latent Diffusion6 Jun
  5. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding23 May
  6. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents13 Apr
  7. 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models20 Dec
  8. 2021Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images29 Nov
  9. 2021DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation6 Oct

Other references · 33

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  3. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  4. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,177
  5. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  6. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
  7. 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,058
  8. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  9. 2019Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distributioncited by 4,101
  10. 2020Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 3,253
  11. 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,431
  12. 2022An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversioncited by 2,245
21 more
  1. 2015Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Servercited by 1,462
  2. 2020Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translationcited by 727
  3. 2019Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?cited by 675
  4. 2021ClipCap: CLIP Prefix for Image Captioningcited by 559
  5. 2021Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulationcited by 544
  6. 2021Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Imagescited by 427
  7. 2021GAN Inversion: A Surveycited by 367
  8. 2019Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images?cited by 356
  9. 2016Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifoldcited by 348
  10. 2022Text2LIVE: Text-Driven Layered Image and Video Editingcited by 312
  11. 2022VQGAN-CLIP: Open Domain Image Generation and Editing with Natural Language Guidancecited by 285
  12. 2021HyperStyle: StyleGAN Inversion with HyperNetworks for Real Image Editingcited by 208
  13. 2021CLIPstyler: Image Style Transfer with a Single Text Conditioncited by 203
  14. 2021High-Fidelity GAN Inversion for Image Attribute Editingcited by 197
  15. 2016Semantic Image Inpainting with Deep Generative Modelscited by 157
  16. 2016Inverting The Generator Of A Generative Adversarial Networkcited by 140
  17. 2021From Show to Tell: A Survey on Deep Learning-based Image Captioningcited by 138
  18. 2022KNN-Diffusion: Image Generation via Large-Scale Retrievalcited by 137
  19. 2022Unifying Diffusion Models' Latent Space, with Applications to CycleDiffusion and Guidancecited by 67
  20. 2022State-of-the-Art in the Architecture, Methods and Applications of StyleGANcited by 34
  21. 2022FlexIT: Towards Flexible Semantic Image Translationcited by 28

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 3; 2023: 255; 2024: 365; 2025: 314; 2026: 242.

1,179 papers.

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  1. 2023AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuningcited by 1,433
  2. 2023Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformerscited by 648
  3. 2023MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editingcited by 624
  4. 2023MultiDiffusion: Fusing Diffusion Paths for Controlled Image Generationcited by 536
  5. 2023Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translationcited by 505
  6. 2023FateZero: Fusing Attentions for Zero-shot Text-based Video Editingcited by 466
  7. 2023ELITE: Encoding Visual Concepts into Textual Embeddings for Customized Text-to-Image Generationcited by 416
  8. 2023Analyzing and Improving the Training Dynamics of Diffusion Modelscited by 402
  9. 2024OmniGen: Unified Image Generationcited by 394
  10. 2023LAVIE: High-Quality Video Generation with Cascaded Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 349
  11. 2023SVDiff: Compact Parameter Space for Diffusion Fine-Tuningcited by 338
  12. 2023Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Taskscited by 324
38 more
  1. 2023Pix2Video: Video Editing using Image Diffusioncited by 320
  2. 2023Video-P2P: Video Editing with Cross-attention Controlcited by 314
  3. 2023Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generationcited by 305
  4. 2023Composer: Creative and Controllable Image Synthesis with Composable Conditionscited by 304
  5. 2023The Stable Signature: Rooting Watermarks in Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 304
  6. 2023FreeDoM: Training-Free Energy-Guided Conditional Diffusion Modelcited by 294
  7. 2023DragDiffusion: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Interactive Point-based Image Editingcited by 294
  8. 2023Effective Data Augmentation With Diffusion Modelscited by 283
  9. 2024UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scalecited by 268
  10. 2023Text-to-image Diffusion Models in Generative AI: A Surveycited by 265
  11. 2022EDICT: Exact Diffusion Inversion via Coupled Transformationscited by 258
  12. 2023Rerender A Video: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Video-to-Video Translationcited by 253
  13. 2023An Edit Friendly DDPM Noise Space: Inversion and Manipulationscited by 244
  14. 2023LLM-grounded Diffusion: Enhancing Prompt Understanding of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Large Language Modelscited by 243
  15. 2023P+: Extended Textual Conditioning in Text-to-Image Generationcited by 242
  16. 2024AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Ideacited by 241
  17. 2023DreamBooth3D: Subject-Driven Text-to-3D Generationcited by 235
  18. 2023Break-A-Scene: Extracting Multiple Concepts from a Single Imagecited by 231
  19. 2024FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Modelscited by 217
  20. 2023Style Aligned Image Generation via Shared Attentioncited by 216
  21. 2023Subject-driven Text-to-Image Generation via Apprenticeship Learningcited by 212
  22. 2024Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Surveycited by 212
  23. 2023A Survey on Video Diffusion Modelscited by 206
  24. 2024Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editingcited by 204
  25. 2025In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformercited by 204
  26. 2023Encoder-based Domain Tuning for Fast Personalization of Text-to-Image Modelscited by 203
  27. 2023VIEScore: Towards Explainable Metrics for Conditional Image Synthesis Evaluationcited by 201
  28. 2023DragonDiffusion: Enabling Drag-style Manipulation on Diffusion Modelscited by 195
  29. 2023Key-Locked Rank One Editing for Text-to-Image Personalizationcited by 194
  30. 2024HQ-Edit: A High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editingcited by 193
  31. 2023Dreamix: Video Diffusion Models are General Video Editorscited by 191
  32. 2023Guiding Instruction-based Image Editing via Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 185
  33. 2023TF-ICON: Diffusion-Based Training-Free Cross-Domain Image Compositioncited by 182
  34. 2023Negative-prompt Inversion: Fast Image Inversion for Editing with Text-guided Diffusion Modelscited by 174
  35. 2024InstantStyle: Free Lunch towards Style-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generationcited by 170
  36. 2023FLATTEN: optical FLow-guided ATTENtion for consistent text-to-video editingcited by 167
  37. 2024Direct-a-Video: Customized Video Generation with User-Directed Camera Movement and Object Motioncited by 167
  38. 2024Semantic Image Inversion and Editing using Rectified Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 165

50 most cited of 1,179 All 1,179 (JSON)

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  1. 2022Direct Inversion: Optimization-Free Text-Driven Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models
  2. 2026Dual Inversion for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: From Both Prompt and Noise Perspectives
  3. 2025Editable Noise Map Inversion: Encoding Target-image into Noise For High-Fidelity Image Manipulation
  4. 2025EDITOR: Effective and Interpretable Prompt Inversion for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
  5. 2024TurboEdit: Text-Based Image Editing Using Few-Step Diffusion Models
  6. 2023iEdit: Localised Text-guided Image Editing with Weak Supervision
  7. 2023Forgedit: Text Guided Image Editing via Learning and Forgetting
  8. 2021More Control for Free! Image Synthesis with Semantic Diffusion Guidance