# FunEditor: Achieving Complex Image Edits via Function Aggregation with Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08495 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08495/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 25 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2024.

## 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, 25 of 25)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [Paint by Example: Exemplar-based Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13227/) (2022)
- [AnyDoor: Zero-shot Object-level Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09481/) (2023)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [Style Aligned Image Generation via Shared Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02133/) (2023)
- [DragonDiffusion: Enabling Drag-style Manipulation on Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02421/) (2023)
- [HQ-Edit: A High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09990/) (2024)
- [HIVE: Harnessing Human Feedback for Instructional Visual Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09618/) (2023)
- [InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03895/) (2023)
- [DiffEditor: Boosting Accuracy and Flexibility on Diffusion-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02583/) (2024)
- [ObjectDrop: Bootstrapping Counterfactuals for Photorealistic Object Removal and Insertion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18818/) (2024)
- [Visual Style Prompting with Swapping Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12974/) (2024)
- [Focus on Your Instruction: Fine-grained and Multi-instruction Image Editing by Attention Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10113/) (2023)
- [LIME: Localized Image Editing via Attention Regularization in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09256/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [CrimEdit: Controllable Editing for Counterfactual Object Removal, Insertion, and Movement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23708/) (2025)
- [TransPhy: Visual In-Context Learning for Physically Grounded Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24119/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have demonstrated outstanding performance in generative tasks, making them ideal candidates for image editing. Recent studies highlight their ability to apply desired edits effectively by following textual instructions, yet with two key challenges remaining. First, these models struggle to apply multiple edits simultaneously, resulting in computational inefficiencies due to their reliance on sequential processing. Second, relying on textual prompts to determine the editing region can lead to unintended alterations to the image. We introduce FunEditor, an efficient diffusion model designed to learn atomic editing functions and perform complex edits by aggregating simpler functions. This approach enables complex editing tasks, such as object movement, by aggregating multiple functions and applying them simultaneously to specific areas. Our experiments demonstrate that FunEditor significantly outperforms recent inference-time optimization methods and fine-tuned models, either quantitatively across various metrics or through visual comparisons or both, on complex tasks like object movement and object pasting. In the meantime, with only 4 steps of inference, FunEditor achieves 5-24x inference speedups over existing popular methods. The code is available at: mhmdsmdi.github.io/funeditor/.