# Are Image-to-Video Models Good Zero-Shot Image Editors?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19435 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19435/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 89 of its 112 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 89)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (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)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [Latte: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03048/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [OmniGen: Unified Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11340/) (2024)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [Text2LIVE: Text-Driven Layered Image and Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02491/) (2022)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)

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

- [EndoCoT: Scaling Endogenous Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12252/) (2026)
- [PhyEditBench: A Real-World Multi-Stage Benchmark for Physics-Aware Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26551/) (2026)
- [TRACE: High-Fidelity 3D Scene Editing via Tangible Reconstruction and Geometry-Aligned Contextual Video Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01207/) (2026)
- [Visual General Intelligence: A White Paper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25924/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale video diffusion models show strong world simulation and temporal reasoning abilities, but their use as zero-shot image editors remains underexplored. We introduce IF-Edit, a tuning-free framework that repurposes pretrained image-to-video diffusion models for instruction-driven image editing. IF-Edit addresses three key challenges: prompt misalignment, redundant temporal latents, and blurry late-stage frames. It includes (1) a chain-of-thought prompt enhancement module that transforms static editing instructions into temporally grounded reasoning prompts; (2) a temporal latent dropout strategy that compresses frame latents after the expert-switch point, accelerating denoising while preserving semantic and temporal coherence; and (3) a self-consistent post-refinement step that sharpens late-stage frames using a short still-video trajectory. Experiments on four public benchmarks, covering non-rigid editing, physical and temporal reasoning, and general instruction edits, show that IF-Edit performs strongly on reasoning-centric tasks while remaining competitive on general-purpose edits. Our study provides a systematic view of video diffusion models as image editors and highlights a simple recipe for unified video-image generative reasoning.