English

FlowBypass: Rectified Flow Trajectory Bypass for Training-Free Image Editing

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-02-03 v1

Abstract

Training-free image editing has attracted increasing attention for its efficiency and independence from training data. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on inversion-reconstruction trajectories, which impose an inherent trade-off: longer trajectories accumulate errors and compromise fidelity, while shorter ones fail to ensure sufficient alignment with the edit prompt. Previous attempts to address this issue typically employ backbone-specific feature manipulations, limiting general applicability. To address these challenges, we propose FlowBypass, a novel and analytical framework grounded in Rectified Flow that constructs a bypass directly connecting inversion and reconstruction trajectories, thereby mitigating error accumulation without relying on feature manipulations. We provide a formal derivation of two trajectories, from which we obtain an approximate bypass formulation and its numerical solution, enabling seamless trajectory transitions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowBypass consistently outperforms state-of-the-art image editing methods, achieving stronger prompt alignment while preserving high-fidelity details in irrelevant regions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.01805,
  title  = {FlowBypass: Rectified Flow Trajectory Bypass for Training-Free Image Editing},
  author = {Menglin Han and Zhangkai Ni},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.01805},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:31:16.186Z