# Single-Step Bidirectional Unpaired Image Translation Using Implicit Bridge Consistency Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15056 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15056/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16213/) (2023)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02938/) (2021)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [Consistency Trajectory Models: Learning Probability Flow ODE Trajectory of Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02279/) (2023)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05192/) (2017)
- [Likelihood Training of Schr"odinger Bridge using Forward-Backward SDEs Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11291/) (2021)
- [Dual Diffusion Implicit Bridges for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08382/) (2022)
- [Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16948/) (2023)
- [EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06635/) (2022)
- [One-Step Image Translation with Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12036/) (2024)
- [Geometry-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks for One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05852/) (2018)
- [Noise2Score: Tweedie's Approach to Self-Supervised Image Denoising without Clean Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07009/) (2021)
- [Deep Generative Learning via Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10410/) (2021)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Neural Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15086/) (2023)
- [One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00826/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via a Self-Supervised Semantic Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16664/) (2026)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation for Segmentation and Signal Unmixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20746/) (2025)
- [ChopGrad: Pixel-Wise Losses for Latent Video Diffusion via Truncated Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17812/) (2026)
- [Diffusion-based translation between unpaired spontaneous premature neonatal EEG and fetal MEG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14224/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unpaired image-to-image translation has seen significant progress since the introduction of CycleGAN. However, methods based on diffusion models or Schr"odinger bridges have yet to be widely adopted in real-world applications due to their iterative sampling nature. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, Implicit Bridge Consistency Distillation (IBCD), which enables single-step bidirectional unpaired translation without using adversarial loss. IBCD extends consistency distillation by using a diffusion implicit bridge model that connects PF-ODE trajectories between distributions. Additionally, we introduce two key improvements: 1) distribution matching for consistency distillation and 2) adaptive weighting method based on distillation difficulty. Experimental results demonstrate that IBCD achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets in a single generation step. Project page available at https://hyn2028.github.io/projectpage/IBCD/index.html