Constrained Look-ahead Guidance for Interference-Aware Flow Editing

Doudou Zhang, Qi Chen

Diffusion and flow models enable powerful generative modeling, but controlled editing remains challenging due to the need to balance source fidelity and edit compliance along the generative trajectory. We propose a principled, inversion-free framework for flow-based image editing from a trajectory centric perspective. Rather than relying on inversion or heuristic guidance, we introduce a one-step look-ahead mechanism that evaluates the effect of candidate updates on both edit and fidelity rewards estimated via denoising, and adjusts the current update based on this evaluation. At each step, our method applies reward-driven corrections guided by the look-ahead evaluation under an explicit fidelity constraint, resulting in stable and coherent trajectory evolution. This look-ahead design mitigates gradient interference between edit and fidelity objectives by anticipating their interaction in future states, leading to improved trade-offs. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves stronger semantic edits while better preserving source content compared to existing strong baselines.