DreamSteerer: Enhancing Source Image Conditioned Editability using Personalized Diffusion Models

Authors: zhengyang  yu
zhaoyuan  yang
jing  zhang
Venue: NeurIPS_cc_2024_Conference
Published: 2024-05-13 06:24:06

Abstract: Recent text-to-image (T2I) personalization methods have shown great premise in teaching a diffusion model user-specified concepts given a few images for reusing the acquired concepts in a novel context. With massive efforts being dedicated to personalized generation, a promising extension is personalized editing, namely to edit an image using personalized concepts, which can provide more precise guidance signal than traditional textual guidance. To address this, one straightforward solution is to incorporate a personalized diffusion model with a text-driven editing framework. However, such solution often shows unsatisfactory editability on the source image. To address this, we propose DreamSteerer, a plug-in method for augmenting existing T2I personalization methods. Specifically, we enhance the source image conditioned editability of a personalized diffusion model via a novel Editability Driven Score Distillation (EDSD) objective. Moreover, we identify a mode trapping issue with EDSD, and propose a mode shifting regularization with spatial feature guided sampling to avoid such issue. We further employ two key modifications on the Delta Denoising Score framework that enable high-fidelity local editing with personalized concepts. Extensive experiments validate that DreamSteerer can significantly improve the editability of several T2I personalization baselines while being computationally efficient.

Main paper: 
 introduction: 
 Text-to-Image Diffusion Probabilistic Models (T2I DPMs) [58, 61] have revolutionized novel content creation due to their superior capacity in both sample fidelity and mode coverage, as well as their flexibility in achieving effortless concept composition [44] and user-friendly control [35] . Despite the success of these models, the limited expressiveness of natural language may lead to ambiguity in real-world scenarios where users demand greater specificity and engagement in the creation process. This challenge has sparked extensive research in T2I Personalization [10, 16, 62] . Specifically, personalization is the process of teaching T2I DPMs a novel visual concept with a few (usually 3-8) reference images by fine-tuning the pre-trained model parameters. After personalization, the personal concept is linked to a rare token in the text encoder dictionary, e.g., "[my_dog]", enabling flexible reuse of the visual concept in new contexts, e.g., "a photo of [my_dog] wearing an astronaut suit". Despite the success of these models, the majority of previous works have been focusing on personalized generation, emphasizing the preservation of concept identity across varying textual conditions. In this work, we explore a natural extension on these methods to perform image editing with acquired concepts, namely personalized editing, which can be promising in enabling higher level Figure 1 : DreamSteerer enables efficient editability enhancement for a source image with any existing T2I personalization models, leading to significantly improved editing fidelity in various challenging scenarios. When the structural difference between source and reference images are significant, it can naturally adapt to the source while maintaining the appearance learned from the personal concept. control over the editing direction than traditional text-driven editing frameworks [21, 34, 55] . The primary goal is to synthesize a high-fidelity image that aligns the appearance and content of the target concept, as well as the structural layout and background of the source image without blindly resorting to copying learned reference images. A straightforward solution to this problem is to incorporate a personalized diffusion model into an existing text-driven editing model, by which personalized editing appears to be trivial via swapping a source subject token in the source prompt by the special token, e.g., "a photo of (dog → [my_dog]) wearing an astronaut suit". However, such a naïve incorporation often leads to severe distortion or failure in natural adaptation to the source image layout. We attribute the essential causes for such failure to the limited scope of reference images in personalization. Under a lack of data diversity, existing personalization methods are prone to collapsing into the patterns of reference images [71] and entangling subject-relevant and subject-irrelevant information [9] . This causes a significant loss in the model's prior knowledge related to the source category, resulting in poor editability [48, 60] in a new context. Additionally, the stricter demands for maintaining structural layout [54, 72] and preserving subject-irrelevant information [12, 21] necessitate a higher level of editability than personalized generation. In more challenging editing scenarios, a certain level of extrapolation on the attributes of personalized concepts may be required, e.g. the editing process may require significant change in subject structure, pose or style to achieve a high-fidelity editing result on the source image. Without information on the source image during personalization, existing personalization methods can hardly be guaranteed to be editable on arbitrary source images.To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose the first approach that enhances the source image conditioned editability using existing personalized T2I DPMs (DreamSteerer). Inspired by the one-step Bayes optimal denoising using Tweedie's formula [15, 59] with DPMs [3, 7, 11, 47, 69] , and the probabilistic score distillation sampling [22, 57, 74] , we formulate editability enhancement on the source image as a novel score distillation objective, dubbed Editability Driven Score Distillation (EDSD). Then we identify the existence of a mode trapping issue when directly optimizing EDSD. Inspired by recent success in zero-shot semantic correspondence [1, 6, 80] based on the strong spatial awareness of UNet attention features, we propose a spatial guided sampling strategy that produces a regularization set which alleviates the mode trapping issue via shifting the mode of personalized DPMs distribution. We further make two major modifications on the Delta Denoising Score (DDS) [22] framework for a valid adaptation from text-driven editing to personalized editing.We summarize our main contributions as: 1) we identify and analyze the lack of editability in existing T2I personalization methods for editing real-world images, 2) we propose the DreamSteerer framework, a plug-in method that is compatible with arbitrary personalization baselines and requires only a small number of fine-tuning steps (∼ 10) to achieve significant improvement in editability on a source image, 3) we validate the effectiveness of DreamSteerer on 3 different baselines [16, 39, 62] , demonstrating its efficacy, especially in challenging personalized editing scenarios such as significant structural gaps and data-hungry cases (Fig. 1 ). See Fig. 3 for an overall framework.2 Related Work T2I Personalization. Building upon the success of T2I DPMs [52, 61, 64] , recent works have shown the promise of personalized T2I synthesis [16, 19, 39, 62] . Textual Inversion [16] encapsulates personalized concepts by word embedding optimization, which is further improved by more expressive representation spaces [2, 73] . DreamBooth [62] fine-tunes the full model parameters of a pre-trained DPM that conditions on a rare word token. Efficient fine-tuning methods [9, 18, 45, 71, 77] have been introduced for improving efficiency and generalizability. Custom Diffusion [10] optimizes both a word embedding as well as the UNet cross-attention key and value projections for improved compositionality. We explore enhancement in editability on these three different types of models. More recent studies in encoder-based personalization [26, 63, 65, 79] propose new training paradigms to condition a Diffusion Model on single or multiple input images. Although these works can enable faster inference, they necessitate extensive pre-training and typically limit application to particular domains. New forms of conditioning, objectives or adaptors are proposed for different purposes such as stylization [23, 29, 51] , improved identity preservation [13, 43] , composability [37, 56, 82, 85] , or generation fidelity [50] . Unlike these works, we focus on addressing an inherently different task of improving the editability of personalized Diffusion Models.Image Editing. The conditioning mechanisms [14, 24] and inversion techniques [49, 68] have enabled DPMs to achieve image editing. Earlier works [32, 34, 40] relied on heavy optimization and often failed in local editing, while other works [4, 52] achieved this using user-provided mask guidance. Prompt-to-Prompt [21] achieves both local and global editing using cross-attention map injection without requiring extra guidance. Similarly, PnP [72] proposes employing UNet attention features to achieve image-to-image translation. Masactrl [6] extends Prompt-to-Prompt [21] with mutual self-attention to manipulate subject pose or view. Despite the success of these works, most of them are designed only for text-driven editing, leaving image editing with personalized concepts still under-explored. Unlike preliminary attempts [10, 17] that rely on specific baselines, we consider editing with visual concepts acquired by an arbitrary existing personalization method. Score Distillation. Pooled et al. [57] proposes a novel Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) method that can synthesize 3D assets without requiring 3D training data. For improving sample fidelity and mode coverage of SDS, VSD [74] utilizes LoRA adapters to model a Wasserstein gradient flow, NFSD [31] employs negative prompts, CSD [78] introduces Classifier Guidance. SDS has been improved and extended for different downstream purposes, such as conditional generation of different modality assets [28, 36] , text-driven visual editing [22, 67] and text-aligned generation [3] . 
preliminaries: 
 Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs). With an input image latent state x 0 ∈ X , a corresponding text prompt y ∈ Y, and a diffusion process defined as q (x t | x 0 ) := N x t ; √ α t x 0 , (1 -α t ) I where α t represents the forward process variance at time t and x t is the noised latent state of the input x 0 , a diffusion probabilistic model parameterized by ϕ can be trained using the denoising objective:EQUATIONT2I Personalization with DPMs. Given a diffusion model ϵ ϕ0 pre-trained for Text-to-Image (T2I) generation using Eq. 1, and a small set of image latent states and prompt pairsD ref X Y = {(x ref , ỹref ) n } N n=1, which encapsulate the personalized concepts the user wishes the diffusion model to capture.A general approach of T2I personalization methods [16, 62] is to fine-tune a subset of the source model parameters on D ref X Y by optimizing the denoising objective as:EQUATIONwhere φ is initialized with the pre-trained weights ϕ 0 . The text prompt ỹref takes the form of "a photo of a [S]", where the placeholder [S] corresponds to a new word embedding representing the specific subject. At inference time, the fine-tuned model ϵ ϕ can be used to generate creative images of the specific subject in novel contexts, such as "a photo of a [S] sitting next to a mirror".Score Distillation. Score Distillation is a mechanism for sampling from a source diffusion model under predefined constraints, achieved by performing probability density distillation from the source diffusion model ϵ ϕ to a parameterized differentiable function. In the context of image domains, we represent this differentiable function as x(θ), which renders the image with parameter θ. SDS [57] is the pioneering approach in score distillation, which optimizes x(θ) through a mode-seeking process. Specifically, given a target prompt ŷ that describes the desired edit, the gradient of the distillation objective w.r.t. parameter θ is computed as follows:EQUATIONwhere x t (θ) is a noised latent state of x(θ) at time step t, and ω(t) is a constant determined by the forward process variance. SDS is known to be a mode-seeking process and suffers from issues such as low diversity, over-saturation, and over-smoothness [74] , which lead to sub-optimal performance on downstream tasks. Thus, various SDS variants have been proposed to enhance performance.DDS [22] extends SDS to handle text-driven image editing. Specifically, given a source image latent state x src 0 , a source prompt y src that is aligned with x src 0 , and a target prompt ŷ that describes the desired edit, the parameter θ is initialized using the source image such that x(θ) = x src 0 . For a certain differentiable function x(•), θ can then be updated using the following delta score direction:∇ θ L DDS (ϕ, x(θ), ŷ) = E t∼U (1,T ),ϵ∼N (0,I) ω(t) (ϵ ϕ (x t (θ), ŷ, t) -ϵ ϕ (x src t , y src , t)) ∂x(θ) ∂θ .(4) To simplify the notations, we incorporate all constants associated with score computations into ω(t) for the remainder of the paper.From text-driven editing to personalized editing Existing text-driven editing works like DDS generate high-quality output for image editing with open-world vocabulary; however, their capability of personalized concepts editing remains underexplored. In this work, we focus on bridging such a gap. Given a diffusion model ϵ ϕ personalized via Eq. 2 and the latent state of a source image x src 0 with an aligned source prompt y src (e.g., "a photo of a cat sitting next to a mirror"), our objective is to edit x src 0 using the personalized concept [s] captured by ϵ ϕ . For example, an edit might be "a photo of a (cat → [s]) sitting next to a mirror," where [s] represents your childhood pet cat. We define the target prompt as y ref . The desiderata for personalized editing are concluded as follows • the overall structure of edited image should align with the source image, • the edited part should capture the appearance and content of the personal subject, • the instruction-irrelevant part should be preserved as much as possible.We explore a preliminary solution to personalized editing by employing SDS in Eq. 3 and DDS in Eq. 4 based on the personalized DPM ϵ ϕ , where the differentiable function is initialized by the source image latent state, i.e., x(θ) = x src 0 , and can be updated with ∇ θ L DDS (ϕ, x(θ), y ref ). However, this straightforward solution yields unsatisfactory performance as shown in Fig. 5 (b)-(c ). Specifically, the editing result with SDS suffers from the same low fidelity issues as mentioned by prior work [22, 74] . With DDS, although the overall layout preservation is improved, there still reveals a lack of editability. Additionally, we observe that DDS leads to a severe bias of certain attributes on the source class, leading to unsatisfactory editing results.Source Score Bias Correction. We suspect that such bias is caused by the distribution shift of ϵ ϕ during personalization. As shown in Fig. 2 , a DreamBooth trained for the concept "plushie_tortoise" shows significant bias towards the yellow color in the corresponding source class "tortoise", which leads to the incorrect color of the edited image as shown in Fig. 5 (c ). To address this, we use the pre-trained diffusion model ϵ ϕ0 to conduct the source score prediction in Eq. 4, yielding the modified delta score named as DDS-S, i.e., Direct incorporation between an existing personalized model and DDS-S in Eq. 5 relieves the bias caused by inaccurate source score. However, as shown in Fig. 5 (a) and (d), a deficiency in editability still persists, evident from the structural misalignment between source and edited images. We hypothesize that this issue stems from the misalignment between score estimations of the pre-trained and personalized models, underscoring the necessity for adjustments to the personalized model. An intriguing direction is to adjust the personalized model such that the objective of the DDS-S is further optimized. For this purpose, we first recover the loss from the gradient form of the DDS-S in Eq. 5 asEQUATIONL DDS-S = E t,ϵ [∥ϵ ϕ x t (θ), y ref , t -ϵ ϕ0 (x src t , y src , t) ∥ 2 2 ]. For the purpose of editability enhancement, instead of performing score distillation w.r.t. the rendering parameter θ, we perform score distillation w.r.t. the personalized model parameters ϕ. Specifically, we first introduce a perturbation on the source latent state using the personalized DPM ϵ ϕ as follows:EQUATIONwhich is equivalent to the noised latent state of Tweedie's estimation [11, 15] of the personalized model ϵ ϕ w.r.t. x src t (Sec. B). Then, we define the editability-driven loss asL ED = E t,ϵ [∥ϵ ϕ xt (ϕ), y ref , t -ϵ ϕ0 (x src t , y src , t) ∥ 2 2 ], which is similar to the L DDS-S but with different parameters to optimize. To reduce the computational cost, with a slight abuse of notation, we useEQUATIONwhere all constants are absorbed in ω(t). Intuitively, the perturbation introduced by the single denoising step in Eq. 6 can be interpreted as a small editing step on x src t by ϵ ϕ . Therefore, optimizing L ED can be understood as distilling information from the source model ϵ ϕ0 into the personalized diffusion model ϵ ϕ through xt (ϕ). Specifically, without bias to the reference dataset, the source model ϵ ϕ0 has better editability on the source image x src t than the personalized model ϵ ϕ , thus its score estimation, i.e., the noising prediction, tends to be more accurate. As ϵ ϕ is trained on D ref X Y via personalization, in order for the personalized model ϵ ϕ to achieve a similar score estimation, the "edited" xt (ϕ) would be prone to have characteristics similar to the personal subject without losing the overall fidelity, through which enhancement in editability can be achieved. In Eq. 7, with parameter sharing, ϵ ϕ naturally serves as the score estimator for xt (ϕ), without requiring additional training. The detailed gradient flow is shown in Fig. 3 . 
mode shifting regularization with spatial feature guided sampling.: 
 The mode trapping issue of EDSD. Directly optimizing the personalized model parameter ϕ via Eq. 7 results in a peculiar characteristic observed in the edited and generated images, specifically the generated and edited results show patterns that fall between the reference images D ref X Y and the source image x src 0 . As shown in Fig. 4 (f), when using a silver cat image as source and a brown cat as reference subject, the generated images reveal a hybrid appearance compared to the source model generations in Fig. 4 (e), showcasing features of both silver and brown cats. This observation suggests that EDSD has induced ϵ ϕ to collapse to a trivial trapping point between the modes of the source image and the reference images.Spatial feature guided sampling. To avoid such a mode trapping issue and maintain the concept of the personal subject, we regularize EDSD by jointly training the model on a set of personal subject images. Instead of accessing the reference dataset, we use images generated by the personalized model ϵ ϕ (• | y ref ). We find that guiding the generated samples to have a structural layout akin to the source image x src 0 not only serves as an effective regularization but also shifts the model distribution p ϕ (• | y ref ) towards a more editable region than the original mode centered around reference images.Recent works [6, 72] show that the Self-Attention (SA) features of the T2I DPMs are embedded with detailed spatial information, thus having a strong sense of spatial layout that allows building inter-image semantic correspondence using these features [1, 80] . Motivated by these findings, we propose a spatial feature guided sampling strategy using these features from the source image.As shown in Fig. 3 , we begin by performing the DDIM inversion [68] on the source image using the pre-trained DPM ϵ ϕ0 . At each time step t, for the ℓ-th SA layer from ϵ ϕ0 , an intermediate feature Figure 4 : The effect of different regularization strategies on the editing and generation results of a DreamBooth baseline. The source prompt is "a photo of a cat sitting next to a mirror". T , starting from which the reverse diffusion process is conducted using the personalized model ϵ(• | y ref ). At each time step t, the same set of spatial features {h ℓ t } are extracted, and we aim to condition the model prediction on the source image x src 0 by matching the pairs h ℓ t and ĥℓ t at corresponding spatial locations. For this purpose, following previous work [53, 84] , we compute the patchwise contrastive loss between the spatial features as followsvector ψ ℓ (x t ) is extracted, which is further projected linearly into queries Q ℓ t = f ℓ Q (ψ ℓ (x t )), keys K ℓ t = f ℓ K (ψ ℓ (x t )) and values V ℓ t = f ℓ V (ψ ℓ (x t )). The final output SA feature is computed via ĥℓ t = Softmax Q ℓ t K ℓ t T / √ C ℓ V ℓ ,EQUATIONwhere we treat the spatial feature vectors from the same spatial location as positive pairs, those from different spatial locations are treated as negative pairs andL NCE (h, h + , h -) = -log[ exp(h•h + /τ ) exp(h•h + /τ )+ N n=1 exp(h•h - n /τ )] with some coefficient τ > 0. With Eq. 8, for the generation with the personalized model at time step t, we model the likelihood of a noisy latent state x t matching the structural layout of the source image at time step t as∇ xt log p ϕ ( ĥt | x t ) ≈ ∇ xt L PatchNCE (h t , ĥt ).Following the Classifier Guidance [14] , we modify the noise prediction of Classifier-Free Guidance as followsEQUATIONwhere λ is a weight that balances two scores. Using such a spatial feature guided sampling strategy, we can sample a set of images X gd . As shown in Fig. 4 (h), these images are prone to have a similar structure to the source image without losing the appearance of the personal concept [s]. EQUATIONwhere η is the learning rate. As shown in Fig. 4 (g), the mode trapping issue in Fig. 4 (f) can be avoided with the mode shifting regularization in Eq. 10, where the generated images maintain appearance fidelity comparable to source model generations in Fig. 4 (e) ; meanwhile, the generations exhibit patterns akin to the source image. e.g., features like the blue collar, the presence of "two cats" and subject pose closely resemble those in the source image in Fig. 4 (a), indicating that the mode of p ϕ (•) has been effectively steered to enhance editability for the source image. Furthermore, this enhancement is evidenced by the noticeable improvement in appearance fidelity of edited images from Fig. 4 (c) to Fig. 4 (d ). See Fig. 3 for an overall framework.Given the final steered personalized model ϵ φ after optimization through Eq. 10, although Eq. 5 leads to pleasant target concept alignment,we observe that the subject irrelevant part may not be properly maintained due to the structural layout difference between source and target subjects as shown in Fig. 5 . Inspired by recent work [21, 70] showing that the Cross-Attention (CA) maps concentrate on the relevant regions of the corresponding prompt token, we automatically extract subject masks M (x src 0 ) (refer to Sec. J for details) and we define such masked delta score as DDS-SM:EQUATIONwhich better focuses on editing the subject-relevant regions as shown in Fig. 5 (g). 
experiments: 
 Evaluation metrics. In accordance with the desired editing properties discussed in Sec. 3, we evaluate the effectiveness of DreamSteerer from three perspectives: 1) semantic similarity with the reference images using CLIP image similarity with CLIP ViT-B/32 and CLIP ViT-L/14 [58] ,2) perceptual similarity with the source image using LPIPS with AlexNet [38] and VGG [66] , 3) structural similarity with the source image using SSIM [76] and MS-SSIM [75] . Additionally, to validate the editing fidelity of our proposed method, we report the No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics Topiq [8] , Musiq [33] and LIQE [81] . Implementation details. We evaluate our plug-in method on three personalization baselines: Textual Inversion [16] , DreamBooth [62] and Custom Diffusion [39] , which include the 3 mainstream types of models outlined in Sec. 2. We use the pre-trained checkpoints provided by Dream-Matcher [50] , with 16 concepts for each baseline encompassing living, non-living, in-door, and outdoor subjects. For each baseline, 70 random real-world images are used, focusing on the challenging editing scenarios as shown in Fig 1 . For a fair comparison, all experiments use DDS-SM (Eq. 11) as the editing method.Comparison with baseline methods. Table . 1 compares DreamSteerer against baselines [16, 39, 62] . Our work shows clear improvement in all 3 types of metrics, with substantial gains in the perceptual and structural alignment with the source images. Even for challenging editing scenarios (see Fig. 1 ) such as mirror reflections and significant structural changes, where baseline methods often result in distortions and unfaithful structure maintenance, our method effectively calibrates these issues to achieve high-fidelity results. Refer to Supp. F for more editing results. We find that the automatic metrics do not fully reflect the superior performance of our method compared to the baselines, particularly in terms of the quality of edited images. Therefore, we conduct a user preference study using the same criteria in Supp. L; our work is preferred by the users by a significant margin against the baselines.Ablation study. We ablate EDSD and Mode Shifting Regularization to demonstrate their effectiveness in our framework. As shown in Table . 2 and Fig. 6 , without EDSD, the CLIP-I scores remain comparable to those of the full model. However, the performance in source image alignment deteriorates significantly, as indicated by the lower LPIPS and SSIM scores. Without Mode Shifting regularization, exceptionally high structural and perceptual alignment scores are achieved. However, as depicted in Fig. 6 , this often results in a severe loss of target subject appearance information, reflected in consistently poor CLIP-I scores. Overall, combining EDSD and Mode Shifting Regularization achieves the best trade-off between source image alignment and target concept alignment. Fig. 5 provides a component analysis, showing that EDSD effectively improves the editability of the baseline DreamBooth model, resulting in higher structural alignment with the source image in terms of the edited results and the editing directions (refer to Supp. I).One-shot performance. We further evaluate the performance of DreamSteerer against baselines under an extreme data-hungry scenario of one-shot personalization. We observe that Textual Inversion, which does not update the Diffusion Model parameters, cannot provide valid editing results under this setting. Therefore, DreamBooth and Custom Diffusion are used. As shown in Table 3 , DreamSteerer maintains superior performance under these conditions. Notably, DreamBooth, relying on full finetuning, exhibits a severe bias towards the pose and structure of the reference image. Despite such strong bias, DreamSteerer improves its performance by a significant margin, as shown in Fig. 7 .More comparisons with existing works. See Sec. D for a discussion on the setting-level differences between our work and existing subject swapping works [17, 42] . We use a modified Delta Denoising Score as the base editing model, as this method provides stable editing results with all the personalized models we use. However, DreamSteerer is not restricted to a specific type of editing pipeline. We also evaluate the effectiveness of our method as a plug-in for personalized editing with Promptto-Prompt [21] . See Sec. D for a comparison and a discussion on how Prompt-to-Prompt may be incompatible with certain base personalization models due to the limitations of the existing latent state inversion method. 
conclusion: 
 In this work, we identify that existing T2I personalization models fail to deliver satisfactory image editing results. Therefore, we present DreamSteerer, an efficient plug-in method designed to enhance the editability of images conditioned on the source image. DreamSteerer fine-tunes the personalization parameters by training a novel Editability Driven Score Distillation objective under the constraint of a Mode Shifting regularization term based on spatial feature-guided samples. Through experiments, we show that DreamSteerer can significantly improve the editing fidelity of various existing baselines, particularly in challenging editing cases and data-hungry personalization scenarios. We consider DreamSteerer as a pivotal bridge from text-driven image editing to personalized image editing. 
acknowledgement: 
 Special thanks to Peter Tu for providing us with his valuable inputs and support that greatly helped improving our work and for motivating and encourage us on further implementations of our work. This research was, in part, funded by the U.S. Government -DARPA ECOLE HR00112390061 and DARPA TIAMAT HR00112490421. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government. 
safeguards: 
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 Appendix: Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM). Given a diffusion probabilistic model parameterized by ϕ and a diffusion process defined as q (x t | x 0 ) := N x t ; √ α t x 0 , (1 -α t ) I where α t represents the forward process variance at time t and x t is the noised latent state of the input x 0 , DDIM [68] defines the following update rule in the reverse diffusion processx t-1 = √ α t-1 x t - √ 1 -α t ϵ (t) ϕ (x t ) √ α t "predicted x0" + 1 -α t-1 -σ 2 t ϵ (t) ϕ (x t )"direction pointing to xt"EQUATIONwhere σ t is a free variable that controls the stochasticity in the reverse process.DDIM Inversion. By setting σ t to 0, we obtain a deterministic update rule which can be reversed to give a deterministic mapping between x 0 and its latent state x T . We refer this inverse mapping as DDIM inversion:EQUATIONClassifier-free Guidance (CFG). Given a diffusion model jointly trained on conditional and unconditional embeddings, at inference time, samples can be generated using CFG [24] . The prediction with the conditional and unconditional estimates are defined asEQUATIONwhere β is the guidance scale that controls the trade-off between mode coverage as well as sample fidelity and ∅ is a null token used for unconditional prediction.We parameterize the single-step perturbed latent state xt (ϕ) based on Tweedie's estimation [15] , which computes the posterior estimation for the denoised data, i.e., x0 := E[x 0 | x t ] = (x t + (1 -α t )∇ xt log p(x t )) / √ α t , with which we define single-step perturbed latent state xt (ϕ)EQUATIONwhere the same noise added to x t and xt (ϕ).Dataset The pre-trained checkpoints provided by ViCo [20] have 16 concepts, which include 6 toys, 5 live animals, 2 types of accessories, 2 types of containers, and 1 building. The corresponding text prompts of source images are generated by BLIP2 [41] . For editing with one-shot personalization, performance evaluations are conducted on a subset of 20 cat and dog images.Editability Driven Score Distillation The EDSD gradient in Eq. 7 includes a Jacobian term∂ϵ ϕ( xt(ϕ),y ref ) ∂ xt(ϕ), which is computationally expensive and unstable for optimization. Previous work [57] shows that this term can cause instability in optimization and omits the computation of it by setting it to I. As shown in Fig. 8 we find that by setting it to I following previous work, the editing process tends to destroy the structural layout and background of the source image. Meanwhile, the edited image tends to be over-saturated. This indicates that by setting ∂ϵ ϕ (xt(ϕ),y ref )∂ xt(ϕ)= I, the discrepancy between personalized and source model score estimations has been maximized. We find that setting∂ϵ ϕ( xt(ϕ),y ref ) ∂ xt(ϕ)= -I leads to significantly better results with natural adaptation to the layout of the source image. We suspect that this is because, in the former work [57] , the input noisy latent state is independent from the diffusion model. However, in Eq. 7, there exists an entanglement between negative score estimation in the single-step denoising function (Eq. 6) and the score estimation. We leave a further investigation on this interesting scenario to future study.Spatial feature guided sampling During spatial feature guided sampling, to avoid potential numerical instability in the sampling process due to the drift in statistics caused by the additional guidance gradient, we rescale the noise prediction via an adaptive normalization [27] , i.e., εgdϕ x t , y ref , ĥt = AdaIN ϵ gd ϕ x t , y ref , ĥt , ϵ cfg ϕ x t , y ref .Following earlier works [83] , we introduce spatial feature guidance only for the early denoising steps t > t early . After t early , we change the ODE sampler [68] to an SDE sampler [25] to inject stochasticity for improved sample quality [30] . we employ DDIM with a total step of 50, the CFG is set as 1 for the inversion process, 3.5 for the sampling process, and negative prompts "oversaturated color, ugly, tiling, low quality, noisy" are employed to replace the null text token. We set the early stopping step as t early = 30. The size of X gd is set to be the same as the size of the reference images.Optimization details For fine-tuning with each baseline, we employ the same set of trainable parameters as the original personalization process. We use an AdamW [46] optimizer for all baselines; the learning rates are set as 1e-3, 1e-6, and 5e-5 for Textual Inversion, DreamBooth, and Custom Diffusion respectively. The total optimization step is set to 10 with 10 cumulative gradient steps. Experiments run on a single NVIDIA RTX3090 GPU take a fine-tuning time of around 1 minute for a batch size of 1. For all experiments, we use a latent space diffusion model [61] , with pre-trained checkpoints from Stable-Diffusion-v-1-43 , which is augmented with safety modules to mitigate NSFW content.Difference with subject swapping Text-driven image editing methods generally fall into two categories: rigid editing [5, 21] that emphasize the preservation of the source image, and non-rigid editing [6] that focus on changing the view or pose of a subject in the source image while preserving the background. Our work is motivated by bridging the gap in editability between specific concept and natural language conditioning for rigid editing. Subject swapping methods like DreamEdit [42] and Photoswap [17] diverge from our approach in their main criteria. While these methods prioritize alignment with the source subject's location and pose, they do not necessitate maintaining the original structural details as our method does. Furthermore, these works demand a stricter preservation of subject identity and typically do not require a significant level of concept extrapolation like our work, e.g., from a short cat to a tall cat. In Fig. 9 , we provide a comparison with DreamEdit and Photoswap in scenarios involving significant structural gaps. Compared with our work, these works often exhibit severe distortion or fail to maintain structural consistency with the source image.Comparison using different image editing method We employ a variant of Delta Denoising Score as the base editing model as this method is compatible with all the personalized models we use. However, DreamSteerer is not restricted to a specific type of editing pipeline. We also evaluate the effectiveness of our method as a plug-in for Custom-Edit [10] , which directly combines Custom Diffusion with Prompt-to-Prompt [21] . The results are shown in Fig. 10 and Table . 4. Meanwhile, as shown in Fig. 11 , combining Prompt-to-Prompt with DreamBooth can introduce significant appearance artifacts in the edits, which is the main reason we did not use it as the base editing method. Prompt-to-Prompt relies on a source latent state inversion process, typically through Null-Text Inversion (NTI). However, parameter updates during personalization can shift the model distribution for the source class, compromising the editability of the inverted latent state chain with NTI. In comparison, the Delta Denoising Score-based edited method employed in our work does not require an inversion process, providing more robust performance across different types of personalization baselines. We believe this phenomenon is worth further investigation and encourage future works to develop new inversion techniques specifically tailored for the personalized models. More results of ablation study on EDSD and Most Shifting regularization are provided in Fig. 12 Sensitivity analysis on spatial feature guided sampling We ablate on two hyper-parameters λ and cfg introduced in Eq. 9 for spatial feature guided sampling. As shown in Fig. 13 , in contrast to the usual selection of large cfg, e.g., 7 or 15. A relatively small cfg of 3.5 leads to better naturalness of the generated samples that avoids obvious subject appearance drift from the reference images. Meanwhile, a large spatial feature guidance scale λ produces samples that better preserve the structure of the source image. Thus we set cfg as 3.5 and λ as 15.More results compared with the baseline models are provided in Fig. 14 15 16 .More comparison of one-shot performance with the DreamBooth baseline and Custom Diffusion baseline is provided in Fig. 17 H More spatial feature guided sampling resultsMore spatial feature guided sampling results used in Eq. 9 are provided in Fig. 18 , Fig. 19 and Fig. 20 . In Fig. 5 , we visualize the score-based editing directions obtained by taking the editing scores as input to the Stable Diffusion decoder. This is a similar visualization to Katzir et al. [31] . We note that the brown color in the visualization indicates an editing score value of 0. An example of zero-valued latent state decoding is illustrated in Fig. 21 .As shown in Fig. 22 , we observe that the attention maps from decoder layers with resolutions 16 and 32 have accurate subject layout. Thus, we use the averaged CA maps from these layers as the subject mask. Similar to the spatial feature extraction process in Sec. 4.2, DDIM inversion is conducted on the source image x src 0 , by which the averaged CA map that corresponds to the source subject token is extracted, i.e., M (x src 0 ) = E t,ℓ Softmax Q ℓ t K ℓ t T / √ C ℓ .Although DreamSteerer achieves high-fidelity editing results, its performance is still limited by the baseline model. For example, as shown in Fig. 23 , the DreamBooth model trained on the concept [duck_toy] lacks subject appearance invariance preservation. With DreamSteerer, although improved source image alignment is achieved, the editing result loses part of the subject appearance information. We emphasize the importance of devising reliable T2I personalization pipelines with improved editability and sample fidelity for future works.We ask 10 participants to conduct a user preference study of DreamSteerer against different personalization baselines. For each baseline with or without DreamSteerer, a user was asked to evaluate • The answer NA means that there is no societal impact of the work performed.• If the authors answer NA or No, they should explain why their work has no societal impact or why the paper does not address societal impact. • Examples of negative societal impacts include potential malicious or unintended uses (e.g., disinformation, generating fake profiles, surveillance), fairness considerations (e.g., deployment of technologies that could make decisions that unfairly impact specific groups), privacy considerations, and security considerations.• The conference expects that many papers will be foundational research and not tied to particular applications, let alone deployments. However, if there is a direct path to any negative applications, the authors should point it out. For example, it is legitimate to point out that an improvement in the quality of generative models could be used to generate deepfakes for disinformation. On the other hand, it is not needed to point out that a generic algorithm for optimizing neural networks could enable people to train models that generate Deepfakes faster. • The authors should consider possible harms that could arise when the technology is being used as intended and functioning correctly, harms that could arise when the technology is being used as intended but gives incorrect results, and harms following from (intentional or unintentional) misuse of the technology. • If there are negative societal impacts, the authors could also discuss possible mitigation strategies (e.g., gated release of models, providing defenses in addition to attacks, mechanisms for monitoring misuse, mechanisms to monitor how a system learns from feedback over time, improving the efficiency and accessibility of ML).Source from https://huggingface.co/CompVis/stable-diffusion-v-1-4-original. 


Decision: Though the paper has mixed reviews, the majority of reviewers are leaning toward acceptance. The reviewers appreciate that DreamSteerer enhances the users ability to edit personalized diffusion models, and that the authors have conducted a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results, including a human evaluation of results. The AC team agrees that the value of the contribution is sufficient for publication at NeurIPS and thus recommend acceptance.

Reviews: review: paper_summary: paper_summary: DreamSteerer is a proposed fine-tuning pipeline for personalized diffusion models, designed to enhance the custom editability of these models. The authors point out that naively incorporating existing image editing and personalization methods—such as employing score distillation and DDS where the differentiable function is initialized by the source image latent space—results in low fidelity and lack of editability relative to the source image. To address these issues, they propose the following additions that comprise DreamSteerer:
1. Editability driven score distillation (EDSD), to increase the editability of the model by distillation information from the source model $\epsilon_{\phi_0}$ to the personalized diffusion model  $\epsilon_{\phi_0}$ through a single-step perturbed source latent state
2. Spatial Feature Guided Sampling and mode shifting regularization to overcome the mode trapping issue introduced by EDSD (commonly observed in score distillation)
3. Source score bias correction and automatic subject masking to address the distribution shift from personalization, and to focus on the relevant aspects of the image during training respectively.

The authors present thorough qualitative and quantitative results across three metrics: semantic similarity, perceptual similarity, and structural similarity, along with a human preference evaluation. They demonstrate that DreamSteerer consistently improves upon existing baseline methods and include ablation studies to justify various components of the pipeline.
strength_weakness: strength_weakness: The paper’s results would benefit from benchmarking on more extensive personalization datasets, such as CustomConcept101. Currently, the evaluation is based on only 16 concepts from the ViCo repository, a design decision that lacks strong justification. While the selected concepts show a reasonable level of diversity, evaluating the method across a broader set of personalized concepts would enhance the robustness and generalizability of the results.

Additionally, there are minor implementation details that could be clarified in the Experiments section. Specifically, the paper mentions using pre-trained checkpoints provided by ViCo. However, the ViCo GitHub repository does not link to checkpoints for Textual Inversion, DreamBooth, and Custom Diffusion, leading to some confusion about the source of these pre-trained checkpoints. Providing clear information on where these checkpoints were obtained would help improve the reproducibility of the work.
questions: questions: I have minor questions regarding the implementation details to clarify some confusion:
1. Source of Real-World Images: Can you provide more details on the 70 random real-world images used for editing? Were these images scraped from the web or sourced from an existing dataset? Additionally, were images containing a shared superclass used to enhance the feasibility of the editing tasks?
2. Clarification on Figure 5: In Figure 5, it’s unclear where the results in subfigures (e) to (g) originate from. Are these images based on specific source images, or are they entirely generated without any reference images, from the finetuned personalization model?
limitations: limitations: The authors have adequately addressed the limitations and potential societal impact of their work. Specifically, they describe and visualize the limitations of DreamSteerer, which can be constrained by the baseline personalization model, and suggest ways to avoid fidelity inconsistencies in future similar works.
paper_summary: paper_summary: Aiming at addressing unsatisfactory editability on the source image, this paper proposes a novel plug-in method for augmenting existing T2I personalization methods.  Specifically, this framework finetunes the personalization parameters by training a novel Editability Driven Score Distillation objective under the constraint of a Mode Shifting regularization term based on spatial feature-guided samples. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
strength_weakness: strength_weakness: 1. In related work, the authors lack a discussion of recent works for T2I personalization. Most of the works are in the first half of last year.

2. This framework introduces many computing loads in there modules in Fig.3, which worries me about the inference efficiency of this method. It is suggested that the authors can provide some explanation about computational complexity in experiment section.

3. There are some excellent methods for custom editing, such as [1] [2]. It is recommended to compared with these strong baseline to show the effectiveness of this method.

4. As for qualitative results in this paper, obviously, the proposed method forces consistency of the object shape between the source object and target object, resulting in the destruction of the edited object identity compared the reference. This may not be the editing result that the user wants. It is suggested the authors can provide analysis for this.

[1] Custom-edit: Text-guided image editing with customized diffusion models.

[2] DreamEdit: Subject-driven Image Editing.
questions: questions: See weakness.
limitations: limitations: Although DreamSteerer achieves high-fidelity editing results, its performance is still limited by the baseline model.
paper_summary: paper_summary: The paper introduces DreamSteerer, a method to enhance the editability of source images using personalized diffusion models in text-to-image (T2I) personalization. Existing methods often fail to maintain edit fidelity when applied to new contexts due to limited reference images and adaptability issues. DreamSteerer addresses this by introducing the Editability Driven Score Distillation (EDSD) objective, which enhances image editability. To mitigate a mode trapping issue in EDSD, the paper proposes mode shifting regularization with spatial feature guided sampling. This technique aligns the model more closely with the source image structure while preserving personalized concept appearances. Extensive experiments show that DreamSteerer significantly improves editability and efficiency across various T2I personalization baselines.
strength_weakness: strength_weakness: 1、While the paper presents a novel approach, it would benefit from a more thorough discussion regarding its innovative aspects in comparison to existing work in Object Driven Image Editing, such as DreamEdit[1] and SWAPANYTHING[2]. It appears that similar mechanisms are already in place within these frameworks, and a detailed exploration of how the current method distinguishes itself or builds upon these concepts would be valuable.
2、A broader experimental evaluation is suggested.  This should include comparative studies with existing image editing works and other Object Driven Image Editing techniques mentioned in [1,2].
3、The proposed method relies on certain heuristics, such as spatial feature guided sampling and the choice of specific parameters for mode shifting regularization.  These heuristics may not generalize well across different datasets or tasks, leading to suboptimal performance in some scenarios.

[1] DreamEdit: Subject-driven Image Editing
[2] SWAPANYTHING: Enabling Arbitrary Object Swapping in Personalized Visual Editing
questions: questions: Figure 14 and 13 is same.
Insufficient resolution of figures provided in the paper
limitations: limitations: The paper discussed the limitations of this work.
paper_summary: paper_summary: This paper proposes DreamSteerer, a plug-in method that enhances existing text-to-image personalization techniques by improving the editability of source images.
 DreamSteerer proposes a novel Editability Driven Score Distillation (EDSD) objective to improve the structural alignment between the source and edited image by performing score distillation with respect to personalized model parameters. 
It identifies and addresses mode-trapping issues in EDSD using regularization with spatial feature-guided sampling. The proposed method enhances the editability of several T2I personalization methods.
Moreover, they introduce two key modifications to the Delta Denoising Score framework to enable high-fidelity local editing with personalized concepts.
strength_weakness: strength_weakness: * The method lacks comparisons with editing baselines outside of personalization. It also lacks qualitative or quantitative comparison to the cited preliminary works [8, 14]. For the images that also appear in the Custom-Edit [8] such as rows 1,2,5 in Figure 1 of this paper, the result images in the Custom-Edit [8] paper appear to have much better quality.
* The  "mode shifting regularization" approach is not convincing on the effectiveness of the proposed(Figure 5). In Fig.5, the claimed improvement in editing fidelity from Fig.5 (c) to Fig. 5 (d) does not seem obvious. (also  between "(f)" and "(g)" )
* The paper is missing some important metrics for evaluation. In Section 5, the paper finds that automatic metrics do not fully reflect the superior performance of the proposed method. There is no image quality assessment (IQA) metrics used such as [ref1, ref2, ref3]. Also, the structural similarity metrics globally compare the edited image to the source image, which is unsuitable in this scenario since you want to maintain the similarity in the unedited background region, and a local similarity comparison is better suited. [Please check Questions]
* The method is claimed to be efficient in the abstract section. However, the proposed method's speed and cost are not analyzed or numerically measured. The method appears to require significant computation for a single edit. It is recommended that the computational overhead be reported compared to base personalization methods like DreamBooth.
* The example images in the paper have very low resolution, especially when zoomed in.
questions: questions: * In the Method section, how is the given personalized model trained, and on which data?
* In Figure 2, what are the reference images? Are they the same as those in Figure 3?
* In Table 1, what do the user preference numbers indicate? 
* What is the computational overhead compared to a base personalization method like DreamBooth? How many UNet calls are required to edit one single image?
* How would the performance of the proposed method compare with the recent personalization methods like DreamMatcher?

* The paper is missing some important recent works in personalization:
  * DreamMatcher: Appearance Matching Self-Attention for Semantically-Consistent Text-to-Image Personalization (CVPR 2024)
  * Style Aligned Image Generation via Shared Attention (CVPR 2024)
  * Visual Instruction Inversion: Image Editing via Visual Prompting (NeurIPS 2023)
  * MagicFusion: Boosting Text-to-Image Generation Performance by Fusing Diffusion Models

* References for Weakness section:
  * [ref1] C. Chen, J. Mo, J. Hou, H. Wu, L. Liao, W. Sun, Q. Yan, and W. Lin. Topiq: A top-down approach from semantics to distortions for image quality assessment. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2024.
  * [ref2] J. Ke, Q. Wang, Y. Wang, P. Milanfar, and F. Yang. Musiq: Multi-scale image quality transformer. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF international conference on computer vision, 2021.
  * [ref3] W. Zhang, G. Zhai, Y. Wei, X. Yang, and K. Ma. Blind image quality assessment via vision-language correspondence: A multitask learning perspective. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2023.
limitations: limitations: Discussed in Appendix J

Comments: title: comment from reviewer
Official Comment by Reviewer zDhi
[Gentle reminder] One day remains before the end of discussion period
comment: Thanks for your suggestions. Following are responses to your concerns.

>**Sensitivity of hyper-parameter $\lambda$** 

In all our experiments, regardless of the personalization baseline used, we set $\lambda$ to 15. Figures 15-17 in the appendix illustrate that this parameter choice reliably produces guided samples that not only retain the structural layout of the source image but also ensure the appearance fidelity of the reference subject is preserved. This level of performance is consistent across a wide variety of personalization baselines, source images, and reference images. Our approach eliminates the need for users to meticulously adjust hyperparameters to achieve significant improvements in editability. A comprehensive ablation study on $\lambda$ will be detailed in the appendix of the camera-ready manuscript.

>**Improvement compared to Custom-Edit**

The improvement compared to Custom-Edit is less significant for metrics related to the alignment with source image such as SSIM and LPIPS. This is because Custom-Edit uses Prompt-to-Prompt as the base editing model which enforces the source structural alignment with the attention injection mechanism. However, when our method is applied as a plug-in, we consistently see enhanced performance in reference appearance alignment metrics (CLIP score) and overall image quality (Topiq, Musiq, and LIQE), as illustrated in Fig.B. 

Additionally, as noted in part 2 of the general comments, the Prompt-to-Prompt model used by Custom-Edit fails to produce valid edits for DreamBooth due to its reliance on a latent-state inversion process with Null-Text Inversion, which lacks editability for certain personalized models. Unlike Prompt-to-Prompt, the DDS-SM base editing method used in our main paper does not encounter this issue and is effective across various personalization approaches. Our approach, using DDS-SM as the base editing method, is not limited to a specific personalization technique; instead, it offers a versatile plug-in solution that enhances performance across a broad range of metrics for different personalization baselines.

>**Lossless compression** 

Thanks for the suggestion. We will consider this for camera-ready version of the manuscript and will ensure that the presented figures have sufficient resolution that matches the quality of images in the attached pdf file. 

Thanks again for your valuable suggestions. We sincerely hope you can consider re-scoring our paper.
Thank you for answering my questions. After reading the author's rebuttal, I think the current version still needs revision in terms of (I) experiments on the sensitivity of the heuristic network to hyperparameters (the specific value of the hyperparameter λ is also missing in the implementation details), (ii) a more significant performance improvement compared to Custom-Edit, and (iii) further revisions to the current paper, such as supplementing the paper with additional details like λ and also the use of lossless compression to reduce the volume while maintaining the sharpness of the image. Therefore, I will keep my rating same.
Thank you for your dedication and valuable input! We also appreciate your decision to maintain a borderline accept rating. Your suggestions have helped to improve and clarify our work.
Thank you for your detailed reply. It addresses most of my concerns.

I will keep my rating to borderline accept.
Thank you for your positive feedback and the time you invested in reviewing our work. Your suggestions helped clarify and improve our work.
Thank you authors for the detailed feedback in addressing some of my concerns. I will keep my original score.
Reviewer 2C3N, do you have any additional questions or feedback?
Reviewer zDhi, do you have any additional questions or feedback?
Reviewer AnAq, do you have any additional questions or feedback?
Thank you for your decision to increase the score and your dedicated effort in reviewing our paper! Your comments helped clarify and improve our work.
Thank you for your reply.

The concerns were addressed and I am increasing my score.
Dear reviewers and AC,

Thank you for the time and effort you have invested in reviewing our manuscript and providing insightful feedback. We have carefully considered each of your comments and have prepared detailed responses to address your questions and concerns. It is our hope that these responses have satisfactorily resolved your concerns. As we near the end of the discussion period, we welcome any additional questions or feedback you may have.

Warm regards,

Authors