# Real-World Image Variation by Aligning Diffusion Inversion Chain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18729 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18729/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 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 49 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [VideoCrafter2: Overcoming Data Limitations for High-Quality Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09047/) (2024)
- [VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19512/) (2023)
- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [Direct Inversion: Boosting Diffusion-based Editing with 3 Lines of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01506/) (2023)
- [SSR-Encoder: Encoding Selective Subject Representation for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16272/) (2023)
- [Improving Tuning-Free Real Image Editing with Proximal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05414/) (2023)
- [CustomCrafter: Customized Video Generation with Preserving Motion and Concept Composition Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13239/) (2024)
- [Schedule Your Edit: A Simple yet Effective Diffusion Noise Schedule for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18756/) (2024)
- [EditWorld: Simulating World Dynamics for Instruction-Following Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14785/) (2024)
- [BrushEdit: All-In-One Image Inpainting and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10316/) (2024)
- [Prompt Highlighter: Interactive Control for Multi-Modal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04302/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Attention Maps with Token Optimization for Semantic Segmentation in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14291/) (2024)
- [BELM: Bidirectional Explicit Linear Multi-step Sampler for Exact Inversion in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07273/) (2024)
- [StyleBooth: Image Style Editing with Multimodal Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12154/) (2024)
- [As-Plausible-As-Possible: Plausibility-Aware Mesh Deformation Using 2D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16739/) (2023)
- [Source Prompt Disentangled Inversion for Boosting Image Editability with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11105/) (2024)
- [RealCompo: Balancing Realism and Compositionality Improves Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12908/) (2024)
- [Pay Attention and Move Better: Harnessing Attention for Interactive Motion Generation and Training-free Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18977/) (2024)
- [ReFIR: Grounding Large Restoration Models with Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05601/) (2024)
- [ColorizeDiffusion: Adjustable Sketch Colorization with Reference Image and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01456/) (2024)
- [Free-Lunch Color-Texture Disentanglement for Stylized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14275/) (2025)
- [DreamSteerer: Enhancing Source Image Conditioned Editability using Personalized Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11208/) (2024)
- [DCI: Dual-Conditional Inversion for Boosting Diffusion-Based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02560/) (2025)
- [ERDDCI: Exact Reversible Diffusion via Dual-Chain Inversion for High-Quality Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14247/) (2024)
- [CustomSketching: Sketch Concept Extraction for Sketch-based Image Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17624/) (2024)
- [Model-Agnostic Human Preference Inversion in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00879/) (2024)
- [Hummingbird: High Fidelity Image Generation via Multimodal Context Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05153/) (2025)
- [SARA: Controllable Makeup Transfer with Spatial Alignment and Region-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16828/) (2023)
- [Structure-Preserving Zero-Shot Image Editing via Stage-Wise Latent Injection in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15723/) (2025)
- [Not All Parameters Matter: Masking Diffusion Models for Enhancing Generation Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03097/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent diffusion model advancements have enabled high-fidelity images to be generated using text prompts. However, a domain gap exists between generated images and real-world images, which poses a challenge in generating high-quality variations of real-world images. Our investigation uncovers that this domain gap originates from a latents' distribution gap in different diffusion processes. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference pipeline called Real-world Image Variation by ALignment (RIVAL) that utilizes diffusion models to generate image variations from a single image exemplar. Our pipeline enhances the generation quality of image variations by aligning the image generation process to the source image's inversion chain. Specifically, we demonstrate that step-wise latent distribution alignment is essential for generating high-quality variations. To attain this, we design a cross-image self-attention injection for feature interaction and a step-wise distribution normalization to align the latent features. Incorporating these alignment processes into a diffusion model allows RIVAL to generate high-quality image variations without further parameter optimization. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing methods concerning semantic similarity and perceptual quality. This generalized inference pipeline can be easily applied to other diffusion-based generation tasks, such as image-conditioned text-to-image generation and stylization.