Learning an Image Editing Model without Image Editing Pairs
Authors: name: Nupur Kumari; name: Sheng-Yu Wang; name: Nanxuan Zhao; name: Yotam Nitzan; name: Yuheng Li; name: Krishna Kumar Singh; name: Richard Zhang; name: Eli Shechtman; name: Jun-Yan Zhu; name: Xun Huang
Published: 2025-10-16 17:59:57

Abstract: Recent image editing models have achieved impressive results while following
natural language editing instructions, but they rely on supervised fine-tuning
with large datasets of input-target pairs. This is a critical bottleneck, as
such naturally occurring pairs are hard to curate at scale. Current workarounds
use synthetic training pairs that leverage the zero-shot capabilities of
existing models. However, this can propagate and magnify the artifacts of the
pretrained model into the final trained model. In this work, we present a new
training paradigm that eliminates the need for paired data entirely. Our
approach directly optimizes a few-step diffusion model by unrolling it during
training and leveraging feedback from vision-language models (VLMs). For each
input and editing instruction, the VLM evaluates if an edit follows the
instruction and preserves unchanged content, providing direct gradients for
end-to-end optimization. To ensure visual fidelity, we incorporate distribution
matching loss (DMD), which constrains generated images to remain within the
image manifold learned by pretrained models. We evaluate our method on standard
benchmarks and include an extensive ablation study. Without any paired data,
our method performs on par with various image editing diffusion models trained
on extensive supervised paired data, under the few-step setting. Given the same
VLM as the reward model, we also outperform RL-based techniques like Flow-GRPO.