Yoav Baron

Etai Sella, Yoav Baron, Hadar Averbuch-Elor et al.

Recent diffusion-based image editing methods commonly rely on text or high-level instructions to guide the generation process, offering intuitive but coarse control. In contrast, we focus on explicit, prompt-free editing, where the user directly specifies the modification by cropping and pasting an object or sub-object into a chosen location within an image. This operation affords precise spatial and visual control, yet it introduces a fundamental challenge: preserving the identity of the pasted object while harmonizing it with its new context. We observe that attention maps in diffusion-based editing models inherently govern whether image regions are preserved or adapted for coherence. Building on this insight, we introduce LooseRoPE, a saliency-guided modulation of rotational positional encoding (RoPE) that loosens the positional constraints to continuously control the attention field of view. By relaxing RoPE in this manner, our method smoothly steers the model's focus between faithful preservation of the input image and coherent harmonization of the inserted object, enabling a balanced trade-off between identity retention and contextual blending. Our approach provides a flexible and intuitive framework for image editing, achieving seamless compositional results without textual descriptions or complex user input.

Yoav Baron, Sara Dorfman, Roni Paiss et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly utilized as the conditioning backbone for diffusion-based image editing due to their remarkable multimodal reasoning capabilities. While standalone VLMs demonstrate strong localization capabilities, editing pipelines frequently struggle to maintain this accuracy, particularly in complex, multi-entity scenes. In this work, we investigate this performance gap, hypothesizing that it stems from treating the VLM as a condition encoder. In this role, the model is restricted to a single forward pass, preventing the autoregressive generation process for which it was optimized, thereby failing to fully expose its capabilities. To investigate whether this spatial understanding persists when the VLM is used as a condition encoder, we introduce Analysis-by-Proxy. In this framework, we train a lightweight, interpretable proxy model on the VLM's intermediate representations using an auxiliary localization task. By analyzing the VLM through this proxy, we uncover the specific VLM representations that encode localization information. Our findings expose a fundamental mismatch between how spatial knowledge is represented within a VLM condition encoder and how it is extracted by current editing pipelines. We reveal that under single-pass constraints, the localization signal does not reliably propagate to the predefined layer configurations commonly used for conditioning. Instead, this crucial signal remains hidden within intermediate representations, at locations that vary depending on the input prompt. Using our introduced Analysis-by-Proxy framework, we reveal the fundamental failures of existing condition extraction strategies in editing pipelines, opening the door to more principled design of conditioning architectures.