# Text-to-Image Rectified Flow as Plug-and-Play Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03293 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03293/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 44 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Flow matching, time series and science](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/flow-matching-time-series-and-science/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [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)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [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)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (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)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16213/) (2023)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [Stochastic Interpolants: A Unifying Framework for Flows and Diffusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08797/) (2023)
- [MVDream: Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16512/) (2023)
- [SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08740/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08629/) (2024)
- [Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04746/) (2024)
- [Zigzag Diffusion Sampling: Diffusion Models Can Self-Improve via Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10891/) (2024)
- [Steering Rectified Flow Models in the Vector Field for Controlled Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00100/) (2024)
- [UniEdit-Flow: Unleashing Inversion and Editing in the Era of Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13109/) (2025)
- [SplitFlow: Flow Decomposition for Inversion-Free Text-to-Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25970/) (2025)
- [On the minimax optimality of Flow Matching through the connection to kernel density estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13336/) (2025)
- [EditInfinity: Image Editing with Binary-Quantized Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20217/) (2025)
- [OP-GRPO: Efficient Off-Policy GRPO for Flow-Matching Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04142/) (2026)
- [Distribution estimation via Flow Matching with Lipschitz guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02337/) (2025)
- [Flow Straight and Fast in Hilbert Space: Functional Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10384/) (2025)
- [DAGSM: Disentangled Avatar Generation with GS-enhanced Mesh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15205/) (2024)
- [Robust 3D-Masked Part-level Editing in 3D Gaussian Splatting with Regularized Score Distillation Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11061/) (2025)
- [Mean Flow Distillation: Robust and Stable Distillation for Flow Matching Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11155/) (2026)
- [Delta Rectified Flow Sampling for Text-to-Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05342/) (2025)
- [Are Image-to-Video Models Good Zero-Shot Image Editors?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19435/) (2025)
- [Target-aware Image Editing via Cycle-consistent Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20212/) (2025)
- [FlowOpt: Fast Optimization Through Whole Flow Processes for Training-Free Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22010/) (2025)
- [Environment-Aware Channel Inference via Cross-Modal Flow: From Multimodal Sensing to Wireless Channels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04966/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Weighted h-Transform Sampling for Coarse-Guided Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12057/) (2026)
- [Diffusion Models are Secretly Zero-Shot 3DGS Harmonizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06740/) (2025)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via a Self-Supervised Semantic Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16664/) (2026)
- [TRACE: High-Fidelity 3D Scene Editing via Tangible Reconstruction and Geometry-Aligned Contextual Video Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01207/) (2026)
- [InteractPro: A Unified Framework for Motion-Aware Image Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10090/) (2024)
- [FlowSteer: Conditioning Flow Field for Consistent Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08125/) (2025)
- [From Competition to Coopetition: Coopetitive Training-Free Image Editing Based on Text Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15948/) (2026)
- [Z2-Sampling: Zero-Cost Zigzag Trajectories for Semantic Alignment in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23536/) (2026)
- [VAGS: Velocity Adaptive Guidance Scale for Image Editing and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15661/) (2026)
- [SAM-Flow: Source-Anchored Masked Flow for Training-Free Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06228/) (2026)
- [MusRec: Zero-Shot Text-to-Music Editing via Rectified Flow and Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04376/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale diffusion models have achieved remarkable performance in generative tasks. Beyond their initial training applications, these models have proven their ability to function as versatile plug-and-play priors. For instance, 2D diffusion models can serve as loss functions to optimize 3D implicit models. Rectified flow, a novel class of generative models, enforces a linear progression from the source to the target distribution and has demonstrated superior performance across various domains. Compared to diffusion-based methods, rectified flow approaches surpass in terms of generation quality and efficiency, requiring fewer inference steps. In this work, we present theoretical and experimental evidence demonstrating that rectified flow based methods offer similar functionalities to diffusion models - they can also serve as effective priors. Besides the generative capabilities of diffusion priors, motivated by the unique time-symmetry properties of rectified flow models, a variant of our method can additionally perform image inversion. Experimentally, our rectified flow-based priors outperform their diffusion counterparts - the SDS and VSD losses - in text-to-3D generation. Our method also displays competitive performance in image inversion and editing.