# Contrastive Denoising Score for Text-guided Latent Diffusion Image Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18608/

## Key facts

- Cited by 49 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 27 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [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)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [An Edit Friendly DDPM Noise Space: Inversion and Manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06140/) (2023)
- [Splicing ViT Features for Semantic Appearance Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00424/) (2022)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Multi-Modal Models: Pretraining and Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02591/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-based Image Translation using Disentangled Style and Content Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15264/) (2022)
- [Geometry-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks for One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05852/) (2018)
- [One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00826/) (2017)
- [Improving Tuning-Free Real Image Editing with Proximal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05414/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Contrastive Loss for Text-Guided Diffusion Image Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08622/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Adaptation of GAN in Just One CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09301/) (2022)
- [ED-NeRF: Efficient Text-Guided Editing of 3D Scene with Latent Space NeRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02712/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08629/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17525/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Score Distillation as a Bridge Between Image Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09417/) (2024)
- [InstantSwap: Fast Customized Concept Swapping across Sharp Shape Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01197/) (2024)
- [DreamMotion: Space-Time Self-Similar Score Distillation for Zero-Shot Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12002/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Audio-Visual Editing via Cross-Modal Delta Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20782/) (2025)
- [FDS: Frequency-Aware Denoising Score for Text-Guided Latent Diffusion Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19191/) (2025)
- [Latent Diffusion Models with Masked AutoEncoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09984/) (2025)
- [Dual-Schedule Inversion: Training- and Tuning-Free Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11152/) (2024)
- [Not Just Text: Uncovering Vision Modality Typographic Threats in Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05538/) (2024)
- [Distributionally Robust Graph Out-of-Distribution Recommendation via Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15555/) (2025)
- [Balanced Image Stylization with Style Matching Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07601/) (2025)
- [EditCLIP: Representation Learning for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20318/) (2025)
- [Cora: Correspondence-aware image editing using few step diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23907/) (2025)
- [ManipShield: A Unified Framework for Image Manipulation Detection, Localization and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14259/) (2025)
- [Unified Editing of Panorama, 3D Scenes, and Videos Through Disentangled Self-Attention Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16823/) (2024)
- [Attention in Diffusion Model: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03738/) (2025)
- [MDE-Edit: Masked Dual-Editing for Multi-Object Image Editing via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05101/) (2025)
- [Delta Rectified Flow Sampling for Text-to-Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05342/) (2025)
- [Training-Free Reward-Guided Image Editing via Trajectory Optimal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25845/) (2025)
- [EditHF-1M: A Million-Scale Rich Human Preference Feedback for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14916/) (2026)
- [Latent Space Disentanglement in Diffusion Transformers Enables Precise Zero-shot Semantic Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08196/) (2024)
- [Exploring the latent space of diffusion models directly through singular value decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02225/) (2025)
- [Identity-preserving Distillation Sampling by Fixed-Point Iterator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19930/) (2025)
- [Contrastive Learning Guided Latent Diffusion Model for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20484/) (2025)
- [Stable Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09168/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Image Editing with LLMs: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Intermediate-Layer Probing Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19775/) (2026)
- [Ground-A-Score: Scaling Up the Score Distillation for Multi-Attribute Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13551/) (2024)
- [Latent Space Disentanglement in Diffusion Transformers Enables Zero-shot Fine-grained Semantic Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13335/) (2024)
- [Reference-free Human-Object Interaction Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09130/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the remarkable advent of text-to-image diffusion models, image editing methods have become more diverse and continue to evolve. A promising recent approach in this realm is Delta Denoising Score (DDS) - an image editing technique based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) framework that leverages the rich generative prior of text-to-image diffusion models. However, relying solely on the difference between scoring functions is insufficient for preserving specific structural elements from the original image, a crucial aspect of image editing. To address this, here we present an embarrassingly simple yet very powerful modification of DDS, called Contrastive Denoising Score (CDS), for latent diffusion models (LDM). Inspired by the similarities and differences between DDS and the contrastive learning for unpaired image-to-image translation(CUT), we introduce a straightforward approach using CUT loss within the DDS framework. Rather than employing auxiliary networks as in the original CUT approach, we leverage the intermediate features of LDM, specifically those from the self-attention layers, which possesses rich spatial information. Our approach enables zero-shot image-to-image translation and neural radiance field (NeRF) editing, achieving structural correspondence between the input and output while maintaining content controllability. Qualitative results and comparisons demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project page: https://hyelinnam.github.io/CDS/