# Difference Inversion: Interpolate and Isolate the Difference with Token Consistency for Image Analogy Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07750 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07750/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 43 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2025.

## 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 43)

- [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)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [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)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Language-Free Generative Editing from One Visual Example](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25441/) (2026)
- [When Model Knowledge meets Diffusion Model: Diffusion-assisted Data-free Image Synthesis with Alignment of Domain and Class](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15381/) (2025)
- [Unifying Video Tasks via Spatiotemporal Analogy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33935/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How can we generate an image B' that satisfies A:A'::B:B', given the input images A,A' and B? Recent works have tackled this challenge through approaches like visual in-context learning or visual instruction. However, these methods are typically limited to specific models (e.g. InstructPix2Pix. Inpainting models) rather than general diffusion models (e.g. Stable Diffusion, SDXL). This dependency may lead to inherited biases or lower editing capabilities. In this paper, we propose Difference Inversion, a method that isolates only the difference from A and A' and applies it to B to generate a plausible B'. To address model dependency, it is crucial to structure prompts in the form of a "Full Prompt" suitable for input to stable diffusion models, rather than using an "Instruction Prompt". To this end, we accurately extract the Difference between A and A' and combine it with the prompt of B, enabling a plug-and-play application of the difference. To extract a precise difference, we first identify it through 1) Delta Interpolation. Additionally, to ensure accurate training, we propose the 2) Token Consistency Loss and 3) Zero Initialization of Token Embeddings. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Difference Inversion outperforms existing baselines both quantitatively and qualitatively, indicating its ability to generate more feasible B' in a model-agnostic manner.