# FlowDC: Flow-Based Decoupling-Decay for Complex Image Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11395 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11395/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 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.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

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

- [SteerFlow: Steering Rectified Flows for Faithful Inversion-Based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01715/) (2026)
- [h-Flow: Flexible Flow-based Image Editing via Doob's h-Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10800/) (2026)
- [RIDGE: Re-Noising with Internal Dynamic Guidance for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03059/) (2026)
- [Beyond Temporal Smoothing: Spatial Energy Budgets Stabilize One-Step Diffusion Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32841/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the surge of pre-trained text-to-image flow matching models, text-based image editing performance has gained remarkable improvement, especially for underlinesimple editing that only contains a single editing target. To satisfy the exploding editing requirements, the underlinecomplex editing which contains multiple editing targets has posed as a more challenging task. However, current complex editing solutions: single-round and multi-round editing are limited by long text following and cumulative inconsistency, respectively. Thus, they struggle to strike a balance between semantic alignment and source consistency. In this paper, we propose FlowDC, which decouples the complex editing into multiple sub-editing effects and superposes them in parallel during the editing process. Meanwhile, we observed that the velocity quantity that is orthogonal to the editing displacement harms the source structure preserving. Thus, we decompose the velocity and decay the orthogonal part for better source consistency. To evaluate the effectiveness of complex editing settings, we construct a complex editing benchmark: Complex-PIE-Bench. On two benchmarks, FlowDC shows superior results compared with existing methods. We also detail the ablations of our module designs.