# StableDrag: Stable Dragging for Point-based Image Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04437 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04437/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (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)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08465/) (2023)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11703/) (2018)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [StyleFlow: Attribute-conditioned Exploration of StyleGAN-Generated Images using Conditional Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02401/) (2020)
- [Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03552/) (2016)
- [Text2LIVE: Text-Driven Layered Image and Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02491/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00986/) (2023)
- [DragDiffusion: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Interactive Point-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14435/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [SG-I2V: Self-Guided Trajectory Control in Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04989/) (2024)
- [InstantDrag: Improving Interactivity in Drag-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08857/) (2024)
- [DragFlow: Unleashing DiT Priors with Region Based Supervision for Drag Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02253/) (2025)
- [FastDrag: Manipulate Anything in One Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15769/) (2024)
- [LightningDrag: Lightning Fast and Accurate Drag-based Image Editing Emerging from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13722/) (2024)
- [CLIPDrag: Combining Text-based and Drag-based Instructions for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03097/) (2024)
- [MvDrag3D: Drag-based Creative 3D Editing via Multi-view Generation-Reconstruction Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16272/) (2024)
- [FramePainter: Endowing Interactive Image Editing with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08225/) (2025)
- [Training-free Geometric Image Editing on Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23300/) (2025)
- [Text-to-Image Synthesis: A Decade Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16164/) (2024)
- [DragLoRA: Online Optimization of LoRA Adapters for Drag-based Image Editing in Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12427/) (2025)
- [AdaptiveDrag: Semantic-Driven Dragging on Diffusion-Based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12696/) (2024)
- [Consistent Video Editing as Flow-Driven Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07713/) (2025)
- [DragNeXt: Rethinking Drag-Based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07611/) (2025)
- [ARAP-GS: Drag-driven As-Rigid-As-Possible 3D Gaussian Splatting Editing with Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12788/) (2025)
- [Dragging with Geometry: From Pixels to Geometry-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25740/) (2025)
- [POEM: Precise Object-level Editing via MLLM control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08111/) (2025)
- [Generative Blocks World: Moving Things Around in Pictures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20703/) (2025)
- [AttentionDrag: Exploiting Latent Correlation Knowledge in Pre-trained Diffusion Models for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13301/) (2025)
- [TDEdit: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Text-Drag Guided Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21905/) (2025)
- [DirectDrag: High-Fidelity, Mask-Free, Prompt-Free Drag-based Image Editing via Readout-Guided Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03981/) (2025)
- [RealDrag: The First Dragging Benchmark with Real Target Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12287/) (2025)
- [Structure-Aware Human Body Reshaping with Adaptive Affinity-Graph Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13983/) (2024)
- [DynaDrag: Dynamic Drag-Style Image Editing by Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00542/) (2026)
- [Drag within Prior Distribution: Text-Conditioned Point-Based Image Editing within Distribution Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13349/) (2026)
- [On the Controllability-Fidelity Frontier in Diffusion Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09901/) (2026)
- [In-context Region-based Drag: Drag Any Region to Any Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25907/) (2026)
- [Drag as Evidence: Motion-Grounded Latent Recomposition for Drag-Based Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36755/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point-based image editing has attracted remarkable attention since the emergence of DragGAN. Recently, DragDiffusion further pushes forward the generative quality via adapting this dragging technique to diffusion models. Despite these great success, this dragging scheme exhibits two major drawbacks, namely inaccurate point tracking and incomplete motion supervision, which may result in unsatisfactory dragging outcomes. To tackle these issues, we build a stable and precise drag-based editing framework, coined as StableDrag, by designing a discirminative point tracking method and a confidence-based latent enhancement strategy for motion supervision. The former allows us to precisely locate the updated handle points, thereby boosting the stability of long-range manipulation, while the latter is responsible for guaranteeing the optimized latent as high-quality as possible across all the manipulation steps. Thanks to these unique designs, we instantiate two types of image editing models including StableDrag-GAN and StableDrag-Diff, which attains more stable dragging performance, through extensive qualitative experiments and quantitative assessment on DragBench.