One Evaluation Is Enough: Inversion-Free Image Editing with Trajectory Correction

Lifan Jiang, Taiyang Chen, Senlin cheng, Bolei Xu, Xiaobo Li +4

Real-image editing commonly relies on inversion and iterative sampling, while efficient one-step editors often stabilize a large update by estimating and averaging editing fields at multiple noise levels. We ask a stricter question: is a single temporal field evaluation sufficient for reliable inversion-free editing? Our answer rests on a previously underused duality in a variance-preserving (VP) one-step model: one source-target query at a shared noisy state simultaneously determines a local angular semantic tangent and a clean endpoint displacement. We integrate the tangent over the analytically known remaining VP angle to obtain a nominal one-step transport, and use the endpoint displacement to correct its long-horizon extrapolation through a constrained projection. This transport-first, correction-second construction yields Endpoint-Calibrated Transport (ECT), a closed-form, training-free editor requiring only one noise level, two text conditions packed into one denoiser batch, and one latent update. ECT requires no image inversion, trajectory integration, second temporal observation, or iterative optimization, and can be directly applied to pretrained epsilon-prediction VP…