FreeDiff : Progressive Frequency Truncation for Image Editing with Diffusion Models

Precise image editing with text-to-image models has attracted increasing interest due to their remarkable generative capabilities and user-friendly nature. However, such attempts face the pivotal challenge of misalignment between the intended precise editing target regions and the broader area impacted by the guidance in practice. Despite excellent methods leveraging attention mechanisms that have been developed to refine the editing guidance, these approaches necessitate modifications through complex network architecture and are limited to specific editing tasks. In this work, we re-examine the diffusion process and misalignment problem from a frequency perspective, revealing that, due to the power law of natural images and the decaying noise schedule, the denoising network primarily recovers low-frequency image components during the earlier timesteps and thus brings excessive low-frequency signals for editing. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel fine-tuning free approach that employs progressive Frequency truncation to refine the guidance of Diffusion models for universal editing tasks (FreeDiff). Our method achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods across a variety of editing tasks and on a diverse set of images, highlighting its potential as a versatile tool in image editing applications. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.