# FlowID : Enhancing Forensic Identification with Latent Flow-Matching Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29591 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29591/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 31 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [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)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [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)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00986/) (2023)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [An Edit Friendly DDPM Noise Space: Inversion and Manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06140/) (2023)
- [Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04746/) (2024)
- [In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20690/) (2025)
- [LEDITS++: Limitless Image Editing using Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16711/) (2023)
- [UniTune: Text-Driven Image Editing by Fine Tuning a Diffusion Model on a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09477/) (2022)
- [Learning an Image Editing Model without Image Editing Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14978/) (2025)
- [CMMD: Contrastive Multi-Modal Diffusion for Video-Audio Conditional Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05412/) (2023)
- [Tight Inversion: Image-Conditioned Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20376/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Every day, many people die under violent circumstances, whether from crimes, war, migration, or climate disasters. Medico-legal and law enforcement institutions document many portraits of the deceased for evidence, but cannot immediately carry out identification on them. While traditional image editing tools can process these photos for public release, the workflow is lengthy and produces suboptimal results. In this work, we leverage advances in image generation models, which can now produce photorealistic human portraits, to introduce FlowID, an identity-preserving facial reconstruction method. Our approach combines single-image fine-tuning, which adapts the generative model to out-of-distribution injured faces, with attention-based masking that localizes edits to damaged regions while preserving identity-critical features. Together, these components enable the removal of artifacts from violent death while retaining sufficient identity information to support identification. To evaluate our method, we introduce InjuredFaces, a novel benchmark for identity-preserving facial reconstruction under severe facial damage. Beyond serving as an evaluation tool for this work, InjuredFaces provides a standardized resource for the community to study and compare methods addressing facial reconstruction in extreme conditions. Experimental results show that FlowID outperforms state-of-the-art open-source methods while maintaining low memory requirements, making it suitable for local deployment without compromising data privacy.