OTEdit: Entropic Transport Corrected Trajectory for Inversion-Free Flow-Based Image Editing

Inversion-free methods for text-driven image editing construct direct ODE paths between source and target distributions using pre-trained flow models, but operate on single trajectories vulnerable to noise-induced drift with no mechanism to exploit the geometry of plausible edits. We propose Transport-Guided Flow Editing, which recasts the editing problem in distributional terms: we construct source and target particle clouds in latent space, solve entropic optimal transport between them with an edit-direction-aware cost, and use the resulting barycentric map to define a time-varying correction field for the editing ODE. The transport plan adapts online at each integration step, and the correction strength is governed by a variational co-state derived from the OT anchor, responding to accumulated trajectory deviation rather than following a fixed schedule. The output is a single edited image, but one whose trajectory has been steered by distributional information inaccessible to single-trajectory methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art structure preservation with superior semantic alignment and consistent human preference over existing baselines.