# FlowDrag: 3D-aware Drag-based Image Editing with Mesh-guided Deformation Vector Flow Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08285/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2025.

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

- [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)
- [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)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12202/) (2025)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [DragDiffusion: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Interactive Point-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14435/) (2023)
- [Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10973/) (2023)
- [TVR: A Large-Scale Dataset for Video-Subtitle Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09099/) (2020)
- [DragonDiffusion: Enabling Drag-style Manipulation on Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02421/) (2023)
- [FreeInit: Bridging Initialization Gap in Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07537/) (2023)
- [DiffEditor: Boosting Accuracy and Flexibility on Diffusion-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02583/) (2024)
- [StyleDiffusion: Prompt-Embedding Inversion for Text-Based Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15649/) (2023)
- [TurboEdit: Text-Based Image Editing Using Few-Step Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00735/) (2024)
- [CVPR 2023 Text Guided Video Editing Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16003/) (2023)
- [Drag Your Noise: Interactive Point-based Editing via Diffusion Semantic Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01050/) (2024)
- [GoodDrag: Towards Good Practices for Drag Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07206/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Dragging with Geometry: From Pixels to Geometry-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25740/) (2025)
- [Occlusion-robust Stylization for Drawing-based 3D Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00398/) (2025)
- [A Hidden Semantic Bottleneck in Conditional Embeddings of Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21596/) (2026)
- [DirectDrag: High-Fidelity, Mask-Free, Prompt-Free Drag-based Image Editing via Readout-Guided Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03981/) (2025)
- [In-context Region-based Drag: Drag Any Region to Any Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25907/) (2026)
- [SPECSIA: Stylization Dataset for Novel-View Enhancement in Drawing-based 3D Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00525/) (2026)
- [GADA: Geometry-Aware Deformable Aggregation for Image-Based Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00595/) (2026)
- [InSpace: Structure-Aware 3D Indoor Scene Generation from a Single 360deg Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03990/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Drag-based editing allows precise object manipulation through point-based control, offering user convenience. However, current methods often suffer from a geometric inconsistency problem by focusing exclusively on matching user-defined points, neglecting the broader geometry and leading to artifacts or unstable edits. We propose FlowDrag, which leverages geometric information for more accurate and coherent transformations. Our approach constructs a 3D mesh from the image, using an energy function to guide mesh deformation based on user-defined drag points. The resulting mesh displacements are projected into 2D and incorporated into a UNet denoising process, enabling precise handle-to-target point alignment while preserving structural integrity. Additionally, existing drag-editing benchmarks provide no ground truth, making it difficult to assess how accurately the edits match the intended transformations. To address this, we present VFD (VidFrameDrag) benchmark dataset, which provides ground-truth frames using consecutive shots in a video dataset. FlowDrag outperforms existing drag-based editing methods on both VFD Bench and DragBench.