Edit Where You Mean: Region-Aware Adapter Injection for Mask-Free Local Image Editing

Large diffusion transformers (DiTs) follow global editing instructions well but consistently leak local edits into unrelated regions, because joint-attention architectures offer no explicit channel telling the network where to apply the edit. We introduce AdaptEdit, a co-trained, instruction- and region-aware adapter framework that retro-fits a frozen DiT into a precise local editor without modifying its backbone weights. A lightweight Block Adapter at every transformer block injects a structured condition stream that factorizes what to edit (instruction semantics) from where to edit (spatial mask); a learned SpatialGate routes the adapter signal selectively into the edit region while keeping the rest of the image near-identical to the source; and a Region-Aware Loss focuses the training objective on the changing pixels. Because these components make the backbone's internal representation mask-aware end-to-end, a thin MaskPredictor head trained jointly with the editor can ground the edit region directly from the instruction and source image -- eliminating any user-mask requirement at deployment. We evaluate on two complementary benchmarks: MagicBrush (paired ground-truth targets) to measure pixel-level preservation and edit accuracy, and Emu-Edit Test (no ground-truth images, 9 diverse edit categories) to stress-test instruction following and generalization across edit types. On both, AdaptEdit achieves state-of-the-art results, simultaneously outperforming mask-free and oracle-mask baselines. A seven-variant ablation cleanly isolates the contribution of each component.