# From Statics to Dynamics: Physics-Aware Image Editing with Latent Transition Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21778 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21778/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18871/) (2025)
- [Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06256/) (2025)
- [SmartEdit: Exploring Complex Instruction-based Image Editing with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06739/) (2023)
- [ViPE: Video Pose Engine for 3D Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10934/) (2025)
- [OmniEdit: Building Image Editing Generalist Models Through Specialist Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07199/) (2024)
- [HiDream-I1: A High-Efficient Image Generative Foundation Model with Sparse Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22705/) (2025)
- [UniReal: Universal Image Generation and Editing via Learning Real-world Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07774/) (2024)
- [Uniworld-V2: Reinforce Image Editing with Diffusion Negative-aware Finetuning and MLLM Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16888/) (2025)
- [KRIS-Bench: Benchmarking Next-Level Intelligent Image Editing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16707/) (2025)
- [From Reflection to Perfection: Scaling Inference-Time Optimization for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Reflection Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16080/) (2025)
- [ChronoEdit: Towards Temporal Reasoning for Image Editing and World Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04290/) (2025)
- [Pathways on the Image Manifold: Image Editing via Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16819/) (2024)
- [EditThinker: Unlocking Iterative Reasoning for Any Image Editor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05965/) (2025)
- [Factuality Matters: When Image Generation and Editing Meet Structured Visuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05091/) (2025)
- [PICABench: How Far Are We from Physically Realistic Image Editing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17681/) (2025)
- [Reasoning to Edit: Hypothetical Instruction-Based Image Editing with Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01908/) (2025)
- [ToddlerDiffusion: Interactive Structured Image Generation with Cascaded Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14542/) (2023)

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

- [Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.28185/) (2026)
- [On-Policy Self-Distillation for Multi-Turn Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35611/) (2026)
- [TransPhy: Visual In-Context Learning for Physically Grounded Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24119/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction-based image editing has achieved remarkable success in semantic alignment, yet state-of-the-art models frequently fail to render physically plausible results when editing involves complex causal dynamics, such as refraction or material deformation. We attribute this limitation to the dominant paradigm that treats editing as a discrete mapping between image pairs, which provides only boundary conditions and leaves transition dynamics underspecified. To address this, we reformulate physics-aware editing as predictive physical state transitions and introduce PhysicTran38K, a large-scale video-based dataset comprising 38K transition trajectories across five physical domains, constructed via a two-stage filtering and constraint-aware annotation pipeline. Building on this supervision, we propose PhysicEdit, an end-to-end framework equipped with a textual-visual dual-thinking mechanism. It combines a frozen Qwen2.5-VL for physically grounded reasoning with learnable transition queries that provide timestep-adaptive visual guidance to a diffusion backbone. Experiments show that PhysicEdit improves over Qwen-Image-Edit by 5.9% in physical realism and 10.1% in knowledge-grounded editing, setting a new state-of-the-art for open-source methods, while remaining competitive with leading proprietary models.