Flex-DDCM: Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Image Compression via Diffusion Trajectory Guidance

Yixin Gao, Runsen Feng, Xin Li, Zhibo Chen

Recent zero-shot image compression methods exploit the powerful priors of pretrained diffusion models to produce perceptually pleasing reconstructions without compression-specific training. However, image compression serves not only human viewing but also machine analysis, while existing zero-shot codecs have limited flexibility in meeting the diverse reconstruction requirements of these applications. In this paper, we propose Flex-DDCM, a framework for zero-shot task-oriented image compression via diffusion trajectory guidance. Building on Turbo-DDCM, we adapt the coded diffusion trajectory through task-guided noise selection, embedding the effects of task guidance into the compressed representation. Guidance terms can be applied individually or combined, with timestep-dependent strengths controlling their influence throughout denoising. This design enables task adaptation without introducing additional decoding complexity. Experiments demonstrate flexible trade-offs among pixel fidelity, perceptual quality, and downstream task performance, with competitive performance against trained task-oriented codecs and faster decoding than Diff-ICMH.