Image Editing with Diffusion Models: A Survey

With deeper exploration of diffusion model, developments in the field of image generation have triggered a boom in image creation. As the quality of base-model generated images continues to improve, so does the demand for further application like image editing. In recent years, many remarkable works are realizing a wide variety of editing effects. However, the wide variety of editing types and diverse editing approaches have made it difficult for researchers to establish a comprehensive view of the development of this field. In this survey, we summarize the image editing field from four aspects: tasks definition, methods classification, results evaluation and editing datasets. First, we provide a definition of image editing, which in turn leads to a variety of editing task forms from the perspective of operation parts and manipulation actions. Subsequently, we categorize and summary methods for implementing editing into three categories: inversion-based, fine-tuning-based and adapter-based. In addition, we organize the currently used metrics, available datasets and corresponding construction methods. At the end, we present some visions for the future development of the image editing field based on the previous summaries.

@article{wang2025_2504.13226,
  title={ Image Editing with Diffusion Models: A Survey },
  author={ Jia Wang and Jie Hu and Xiaoqi Ma and Hanghang Ma and Xiaoming Wei and Enhua Wu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.13226},
  year={ 2025 }
}