Edit-VAR: Taming Visual Autoregressive Model for Precise Video Editing

Chongbo Zhao, Jiangming Wang, Xilai Wang, Xinyu Wang, Jingyi Tang +3

Text-guided video editing modifies target content while preserving the appearance and temporal coherence of unedited regions. Training-based approaches provide strong control but demand substantial data and computation. Training-free methods fall into inversion-free and inversion-based paradigms. Inversion-free approaches avoid trajectory recovery, but their source-preserving guidance can limit editing strength and leave semantic changes incomplete. Inversion-based approaches recover a latent trajectory before regeneration, where approximation errors can accumulate and cause source-content drift and temporal inconsistency. We introduce Edit-VAR, the first training-free and inversion-free framework for text-guided video editing with a pretrained visual autoregressive video model. Edit-VAR directly encodes the source video into multi-scale discrete tokens and performs probability-guided conditional token replacement for source preservation. Attention-guided token-wise and scale-aware modulation selectively relaxes source constraints over edit-relevant positions and generation stages. Scale-Decoupled Generation, implemented as late-scale constraint release, regenerates…