# ChordVideo: One-Step, Training-Free, Temporally Consistent Video Editing via Low-Energy Transport

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00769 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00769/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [FateZero: Fusing Attentions for Zero-shot Text-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09535/) (2023)
- [Video-P2P: Video Editing with Cross-attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04761/) (2023)
- [Learning Blind Video Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00449/) (2018)
- [Rerender A Video: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Video-to-Video Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07954/) (2023)
- [FLATTEN: optical FLow-guided ATTENtion for consistent text-to-video editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05922/) (2023)
- [CVPR 2023 Text Guided Video Editing Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16003/) (2023)
- [SwiftBrush v2: Make Your One-step Diffusion Model Better Than Its Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14176/) (2024)
- [FlowDirector: Training-Free Flow Steering for Precise Text-to-Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05046/) (2025)
- [ChordEdit: One-Step Low-Energy Transport for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19083/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One-step text-to-image models enable training-free, inversion-free editing with only 1--2 network function evaluations (NFE), while ChordEdit stabilizes such edits through low-energy smoothing along sampling time. Applied independently to video frames, however, it produces temporal flicker and edit-strength drift. We introduce ChordVideo, which extends the same low-energy principle to video time through shared noise, motion-aligned causal aggregation of per-frame Chord fields, and an optional temporally smoothed proximal correction. We derive a warping-error bound that separates motion bias from stochastic flicker and predicts diminishing returns with larger temporal windows. On TGVE/DAVIS with two one-step backbones, ChordVideo reduces warping error by 78% and flicker by 49%, improves CLIP frame consistency by 9--10 points, and increases background PSNR by about 1.5,dB, while retaining 2 NFE/frame. Compared with seven multi-step editors, it achieves competitive temporal consistency and source preservation using textbf10--60× fewer model steps per clip