FlowCycle: Pursuing Cycle-Consistent Flows for Text-based Editing

Abstract: Recent advances in pre-trained text-to-image flow models have enabled remarkable progress in text-based image editing. Mainstream approaches always adopt a corruption-then-restoration paradigm, where the source image is first corrupted into an ``intermediate state'' and then restored to the target image under the prompt guidance. However, current methods construct this intermediate state in a target-agnostic manner, i.e., they primarily focus on realizing source image reconstruction while neglecting the semantic gaps towards the specific editing target. This design inherently results in limited editability or inconsistency when the desired modifications substantially deviate from the source. In this paper, we argue that the intermediate state should be target-aware, i.e., selectively corrupting editing-relevant contents while preserving editing-irrelevant ones. To this end, we propose FlowCycle, a novel inversion-free and flow-based editing framework that parameterizes corruption with learnable noises and optimizes them through a cycle-consistent process. By iteratively editing the source to the target and recovering back to the source with dual consistency constraints, FlowCycle learns to produce a target-aware intermediate state, enabling faithful modifications while preserving source consistency. Extensive ablations have demonstrated that FlowCycle achieves superior editing quality and consistency over state-of-the-art methods.