# Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04746 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04746/

## Key facts

- Cited by 204 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 74 of its 95 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 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, 30 of 74)

- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08465/) (2023)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [FateZero: Fusing Attentions for Zero-shot Text-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09535/) (2023)
- [TokenFlow: Consistent Diffusion Features for Consistent Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10373/) (2023)
- [Blended Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02779/) (2022)
- [SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10629/) (2024)
- [ControlVideo: Training-free Controllable Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13077/) (2023)
- [Video-P2P: Video Editing with Cross-attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04761/) (2023)
- [Follow Your Pose: Pose-Guided Text-to-Video Generation using Pose-Free Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01186/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 204)

- [FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08629/) (2024)
- [In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20690/) (2025)
- [Follow-Your-Motion: Video Motion Transfer via Efficient Spatial-Temporal Decoupled Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05207/) (2025)
- [FireFlow: Fast Inversion of Rectified Flow for Image Semantic Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07517/) (2024)
- [Follow-Your-Creation: Empowering 4D Creation through Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04590/) (2025)
- [Insert Anything: Image Insertion via In-Context Editing in DiT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15009/) (2025)
- [KV-Edit: Training-Free Image Editing for Precise Background Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17363/) (2025)
- [EEdit: Rethinking the Spatial and Temporal Redundancy for Efficient Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10270/) (2025)
- [VoxHammer: Training-Free Precise and Coherent 3D Editing in Native 3D Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19247/) (2025)
- [UniEdit-Flow: Unleashing Inversion and Editing in the Era of Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13109/) (2025)
- [Stochastic Self-Guidance for Training-Free Enhancement of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12880/) (2025)
- [Unveil Inversion and Invariance in Flow Transformer for Versatile Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15843/) (2024)
- [Sparse-vDiT: Unleashing the Power of Sparse Attention to Accelerate Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03065/) (2025)
- [NANO3D: A Training-Free Approach for Efficient 3D Editing Without Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15019/) (2025)
- [MindOmni: Unleashing Reasoning Generation in Vision Language Models with RGPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13031/) (2025)
- [DragFlow: Unleashing DiT Priors with Region Based Supervision for Drag Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02253/) (2025)
- [Follow-Your-Shape: Shape-Aware Image Editing via Trajectory-Guided Region Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08134/) (2025)
- [ContextFlow: Training-Free Video Object Editing via Adaptive Context Enrichment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17818/) (2025)
- [RelationAdapter: Learning and Transferring Visual Relation with Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02528/) (2025)
- [DNAEdit: Direct Noise Alignment for Text-Guided Rectified Flow Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01430/) (2025)
- [Personalize Anything for Free with Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12590/) (2025)
- [Edit Transfer: Learning Image Editing via Vision In-Context Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13327/) (2025)
- [FreeFlux: Understanding and Exploiting Layer-Specific Roles in RoPE-Based MMDiT for Versatile Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16153/) (2025)
- [Training-Free Text-Guided Image Editing with Visual Autoregressive Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23897/) (2025)
- [Taming Preference Mode Collapse via Directional Decoupling Alignment in Diffusion Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24146/) (2025)
- [Exploring Multimodal Diffusion Transformers for Enhanced Prompt-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07519/) (2025)
- [FiVE: A Fine-grained Video Editing Benchmark for Evaluating Emerging Diffusion and Rectified Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13684/) (2025)
- [ReFlex: Text-Guided Editing of Real Images in Rectified Flow via Mid-Step Feature Extraction and Attention Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01496/) (2025)
- [SplitFlow: Flow Decomposition for Inversion-Free Text-to-Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25970/) (2025)
- [Query-Kontext: An Unified Multimodal Model for Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26641/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rectified-flow-based diffusion transformers like FLUX and OpenSora have demonstrated outstanding performance in the field of image and video generation. Despite their robust generative capabilities, these models often struggle with inversion inaccuracies, which could further limit their effectiveness in downstream tasks such as image and video editing. To address this issue, we propose RF-Solver, a novel training-free sampler that effectively enhances inversion precision by mitigating the errors in the ODE-solving process of rectified flow. Specifically, we derive the exact formulation of the rectified flow ODE and apply the high-order Taylor expansion to estimate its nonlinear components, significantly enhancing the precision of ODE solutions at each timestep. Building upon RF-Solver, we further propose RF-Edit, a general feature-sharing-based framework for image and video editing. By incorporating self-attention features from the inversion process into the editing process, RF-Edit effectively preserves the structural information of the source image or video while achieving high-quality editing results. Our approach is compatible with any pre-trained rectified-flow-based models for image and video tasks, requiring no additional training or optimization. Extensive experiments across generation, inversion, and editing tasks in both image and video modalities demonstrate the superiority and versatility of our method. The source code is available at https://github.com/wangjiangshan0725/RF-Solver-Edit.