Invertible Consistency Distillation for Text-Guided Image Editing in
  Around 7 Steps
Authors: name: Nikita Starodubcev, name: Mikhail Khoroshikh, name: Artem Babenko, name: Dmitry Baranchuk

Diffusion distillation represents a highly promising direction for achieving
faithful text-to-image generation in a few sampling steps. However, despite
recent successes, existing distilled models still do not provide the full
spectrum of diffusion abilities, such as real image inversion, which enables
many precise image manipulation methods. This work aims to enrich distilled
text-to-image diffusion models with the ability to effectively encode real
images into their latent space. To this end, we introduce invertible
Consistency Distillation (iCD), a generalized consistency distillation
framework that facilitates both high-quality image synthesis and accurate image
encoding in only 3-4 inference steps. Though the inversion problem for
text-to-image diffusion models gets exacerbated by high classifier-free
guidance scales, we notice that dynamic guidance significantly reduces
reconstruction errors without noticeable degradation in generation performance.
As a result, we demonstrate that iCD equipped with dynamic guidance may serve
as a highly effective tool for zero-shot text-guided image editing, competing
with more expensive state-of-the-art alternatives.