mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

ReFlex: Text-Guided Editing of Real Images in Rectified Flow via Mid-Step Feature Extraction and Attention Adaptation

arXiv 2507.01496 ↗First posted 2 Jul 2025cs.CVcited by 16

On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing

Abstract (arXiv)

Rectified Flow text-to-image models surpass diffusion models in image quality and text alignment, but adapting ReFlow for real-image editing remains challenging. We propose a new real-image editing method for ReFlow by analyzing the intermediate representations of multimodal transformer blocks and identifying three key features. To extract these features from real images with sufficient structural preservation, we leverage mid-step latent, which is inverted only up to the mid-step. We then adapt attention during injection to improve editability and enhance alignment to the target text. Our method is training-free, requires no user-provided mask, and can be applied even without a source prompt. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks with nine baselines demonstrate its superior performance over prior methods, further validated by human evaluations confirming a strong user preference for our approach.

Key facts. Cited by 16 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 36 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2025.

Builds on

36 of 43 references.

Closest ancestors · 12

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024FireFlow: Fast Inversion of Rectified Flow for Image Semantic Editing10 Dec
  2. 2024Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing7 Nov
  3. 2024Semantic Image Inversion and Editing using Rectified Stochastic Differential Equations14 Oct
  4. 2023Direct Inversion: Boosting Diffusion-based Editing with 3 Lines of Code2 Oct
  5. 2023InstructEdit: Improving Automatic Masks for Diffusion-based Image Editing With User Instructions29 May
  6. 2023An Edit Friendly DDPM Noise Space: Inversion and Manipulations12 Apr
  7. 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions17 Nov
  8. 2022Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models17 Nov
  9. 2022DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance20 Oct
  10. 2022Blended Latent Diffusion6 Jun
  11. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding23 May
  12. 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models20 Dec

Other references · 24

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 52,096
  3. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  4. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  5. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,177
  6. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  7. 2021Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformerscited by 6,968
  8. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  9. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  10. 2022BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generationcited by 4,322
  11. 2021Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generationcited by 4,288
  12. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
12 more
  1. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  2. 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,431
  3. 2021SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 1,937
  4. 2024Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Taskscited by 929
  5. 2022Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translationcited by 906
  6. 2023MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editingcited by 727
  7. 2023Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translationcited by 505
  8. 2022Diffusion Models already have a Semantic Latent Spacecited by 328
  9. 2024FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Modelscited by 217
  10. 2022Splicing ViT Features for Semantic Appearance Transfercited by 209
  11. 2023Cross-Image Attention for Zero-Shot Appearance Transfercited by 136
  12. 2023Beyond First-Order Tweedie: Solving Inverse Problems using Latent Diffusioncited by 78

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 12.

16 papers.

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  1. 2024Task-Oriented Diffusion Inversion for High-Fidelity Text-based Editing
  2. 2022Direct Inversion: Optimization-Free Text-Driven Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models
  3. 2023BARET : Balanced Attention based Real image Editing driven by Target-text Inversion
  4. 2025Tuning-Free Image Editing with Fidelity and Editability via Unified Latent Diffusion Model
  5. 2023StyleDiffusion: Prompt-Embedding Inversion for Text-Based Editing
  6. 2026AdaEdit: Adaptive Temporal and Channel Modulation for Flow-Based Image Editing
  7. 2023Textual and Visual Prompt Fusion for Image Editing via Step-Wise Alignment
  8. 2025LORE: Latent Optimization for Precise Semantic Control in Rectified Flow-based Image Editing