HeadRouter: A Training-free Image Editing Framework for MM-DiTs by Adaptively Routing Attention Heads

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have exhibited robust capabilities in image generation tasks. However, accurate text-guided image editing for multimodal DiTs (MM-DiTs) still poses a significant challenge. Unlike UNet-based structures that could utilize self/cross-attention maps for semantic editing, MM-DiTs inherently lack support for explicit and consistent incorporated text guidance, resulting in semantic misalignment between the edited results and texts. In this study, we disclose the sensitivity of different attention heads to different image semantics within MM-DiTs and introduce HeadRouter , a training-free image editing framework that edits the source image by adaptively routing the text guidance to different attention heads in MM-DiTs. Furthermore, we propose a dual-token refinement module to refine text/image token representations for precise semantic guidance and accurate region expression. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate HeadRouter’s performance in terms of editing fidelity and image quality. The code is available at https://github.com/ICTMCG/HeadRouter.

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Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Graphics
Published
2026-03-02
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3797956
Primary Topic
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

HeadRouter: A Training-free Image Editing Framework for MM-DiTs by Adaptively Routing Attention Heads

Oliver Deußen, Yuxin Zhang, Tong-Yee Lee, Yu Xu et al.
ACM Transactions on Graphics
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
article

HeadRouter: A Training-free Image Editing Framework for MM-DiTs by Adaptively Routing Attention Heads

Oliver Deußen, Yuxin Zhang, Tong-Yee Lee, Yu Xu, Fan Tang, Jintao Li, Xiaoyu Kong
article en

Abstract

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have exhibited robust capabilities in image generation tasks. However, accurate text-guided image editing for multimodal DiTs (MM-DiTs) still poses a significant challenge. Unlike UNet-based structures that could utilize self/cross-attention maps for semantic editing, MM-DiTs inherently lack support for explicit and consistent incorporated text guidance, resulting in semantic misalignment between the edited results and texts. In this study, we disclose the sensitivity of different attention heads to different image semantics within MM-DiTs and introduce HeadRouter , a training-free image editing framework that edits the source image by adaptively routing the text guidance to different attention heads in MM-DiTs. Furthermore, we propose a dual-token refinement module to refine text/image token representations for precise semantic guidance and accurate region expression. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate HeadRouter’s performance in terms of editing fidelity and image quality. The code is available at https://github.com/ICTMCG/HeadRouter.

ACM Transactions on Graphics
University of Konstanz (DE), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN), Institute of Computing Technology (CN), Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (CN), Institute of Automation (CN), Beihang University (CN), National Cheng Kung University (TW)
Openalex Percentile: Top 40%
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
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