Abstract:Diffusion models deliver high-fidelity generation but remain slow at inference time due to many sequential network evaluations. We find that standard timestep conditioning becomes a key bottleneck for few-step sampling. Motivated by layer-dependent denoising dynamics, we propose Multi-layer Time Embedding Optimization (MTEO), which freeze the pretrained diffusion backbone and distill a small set of step-wise, layer-wise time embeddings from reference trajectories. MTEO is plug-and-play with existing ODE solvers, adds no inference-time overhead, and trains only a tiny fraction of parameters. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and backbones show state-of-the-art performance in the few-step sampling and substantially narrow the gap between distillation-based and lightweight methods. Code will be available.
Abstract:Instruction-based image editing aims to modify source content according to textual instructions. However, existing methods built upon flow matching often struggle to maintain consistency in non-edited regions due to denoising-induced reconstruction errors that cause drift in preserved content. Moreover, they typically lack fine-grained control over edit strength. To address these limitations, we propose VeloEdit, a training-free method that enables highly consistent and continuously controllable editing. VeloEdit dynamically identifies editing regions by quantifying the discrepancy between the velocity fields responsible for preserving source content and those driving the desired edits. Based on this partition, we enforce consistency in preservation regions by substituting the editing velocity with the source-restoring velocity, while enabling continuous modulation of edit intensity in target regions via velocity interpolation. Unlike prior works that rely on complex attention manipulation or auxiliary trainable modules, VeloEdit operates directly on the velocity fields. Extensive experiments on Flux.1 Kontext and Qwen-Image-Edit demonstrate that VeloEdit improves visual consistency and editing continuity with negligible additional computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/xmulzq/VeloEdit.