# FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08629 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08629/

## Key facts

- Cited by 217 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [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)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (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)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [Instruct-NeRF2NeRF: Editing 3D Scenes with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12789/) (2023)
- [FateZero: Fusing Attentions for Zero-shot Text-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09535/) (2023)
- [DreamSim: Learning New Dimensions of Human Visual Similarity using Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09344/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models already have a Semantic Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10960/) (2022)
- [EDICT: Exact Diffusion Inversion via Coupled Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12446/) (2022)
- [An Edit Friendly DDPM Noise Space: Inversion and Manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06140/) (2023)
- [Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04746/) (2024)
- [Negative-prompt Inversion: Fast Image Inversion for Editing with Text-guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16807/) (2023)
- [Generative Modelling With Inverse Heat Dissipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13397/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 217)

- [In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20690/) (2025)
- [PixelDiT: Pixel Diffusion Transformers for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20645/) (2025)
- [Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19808/) (2025)
- [ACE-Step: A Step Towards Music Generation Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00045/) (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)
- [UniEdit-Flow: Unleashing Inversion and Editing in the Era of Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13109/) (2025)
- [Reangle-A-Video: 4D Video Generation as Video-to-Video Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09151/) (2025)
- [In-Context Learning with Unpaired Clips for Instruction-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14648/) (2025)
- [FlowAlign: Trajectory-Regularized, Inversion-Free Flow-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23145/) (2025)
- [NANO3D: A Training-Free Approach for Efficient 3D Editing Without Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15019/) (2025)
- [Follow-Your-Shape: Shape-Aware Image Editing via Trajectory-Guided Region Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08134/) (2025)
- [FlowDirector: Training-Free Flow Steering for Precise Text-to-Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05046/) (2025)
- [DNAEdit: Direct Noise Alignment for Text-Guided Rectified Flow Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01430/) (2025)
- [Region-Constraint In-Context Generation for Instructional Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17650/) (2025)
- [Aligning Text to Image in Diffusion Models is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08250/) (2025)
- [HiFlow: Training-free High-Resolution Image Generation with Flow-Aligned Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06232/) (2025)
- [D-OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Continuously Tuning Step-Distilled Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05204/) (2026)
- [EditP23: 3D Editing via Propagation of Image Prompts to Multi-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20652/) (2025)
- [Multi-turn Consistent Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04320/) (2025)
- [ChordEdit: One-Step Low-Energy Transport for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19083/) (2026)
- [Skyfall-GS: Synthesizing Immersive 3D Urban Scenes from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15869/) (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)
- [Minimalist Concept Erasure in Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13386/) (2025)
- [EasyV2V: A High-quality Instruction-based Video Editing Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16920/) (2025)
- [EditMGT: Unleashing Potentials of Masked Generative Transformers in Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11715/) (2025)
- [DynVFX: Augmenting Real Videos with Dynamic Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03621/) (2025)
- [AnchorFlow: Training-Free 3D Editing via Latent Anchor-Aligned Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22357/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Editing real images using a pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion/flow model often involves inverting the image into its corresponding noise map. However, inversion by itself is typically insufficient for obtaining satisfactory results, and therefore many methods additionally intervene in the sampling process. Such methods achieve improved results but are not seamlessly transferable between model architectures. Here, we introduce FlowEdit, a text-based editing method for pre-trained T2I flow models, which is inversion-free, optimization-free and model agnostic. Our method constructs an ODE that directly maps between the source and target distributions (corresponding to the source and target text prompts) and achieves a lower transport cost than the inversion approach. This leads to state-of-the-art results, as we illustrate with Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX. Code and examples are available on the project's webpage.