Improving Image-to-Image Translation via a Rectified Flow Reformulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20186v1
• Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:59:03 GMT
• Title: Improving Image-to-Image Translation via a Rectified Flow Reformulation
• Abstract summary: Image-to-Image Rectified Flow Reformulation recasts standard I2I regression networks as continuous-time transport models.<n>Our method augments the backbone input by channel-wise concatenation with a noise-corrupted version of the ground-truth target.
• Score: 6.198298884034955
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: In this work, we propose Image-to-Image Rectified Flow Reformulation (I2I-RFR), a practical plug-in reformulation that recasts standard I2I regression networks as continuous-time transport models. While pixel-wise I2I regression is simple, stable, and easy to adapt across tasks, it often over-smooths ill-posed and multimodal targets, whereas generative alternatives often require additional components, task-specific tuning, and more complex training and inference pipelines. Our method augments the backbone input by channel-wise concatenation with a noise-corrupted version of the ground-truth target and optimizes a simple t-reweighted pixel loss. This objective admits a rectified-flow interpretation via an induced velocity field, enabling ODE-based progressive refinement at inference time while largely preserving the standard supervised training pipeline. In most cases, adopting I2I-RFR requires only expanding the input channels, and inference can be performed with a few explicit solver steps (e.g., 3 steps) without distillation. Extensive experiments across multiple image-to-image translation and video restoration tasks show that I2I-RFR generally improves performance across a wide range of tasks and backbones, with particularly clear gains in perceptual quality and detail preservation. Overall, I2I-RFR provides a lightweight way to incorporate continuous-time refinement into conventional I2I models without requiring a heavy generative pipeline.

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