SOEDiff: Efficient Distillation for Small Object Editing
Yiming Wu, Qihe Pan, Zhen Wei Zhao, Zicheng Wang, Sifan Long, Ronghua Liang · ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications · 2025
In this article, we delve into a new task known as Small Object Editing (SOE), which focuses on text-based image inpainting within a constrained, small-sized area. Despite the remarkable success have been achieved by current image inpainting approaches, their application to the SOE task generally results in failure cases such as Object Missing, Text-Image Mismatch, and Distortion . These failures stem from the limited use of small-sized objects in training datasets and the down-sampling operations employed by U-Net models, which hinders accurate generation. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel training-based approach, SOEDiff, aimed at enhancing the capability of baseline models like StableDiffusion in editing small-sized objects while minimizing training costs. Specifically, our method involves two key components: SO-LoRA , which efficiently fine-tunes low-rank matrices, and Cross-scale score distillation , which leverages high-resolution predictions from the pre-trained teacher diffusion model. Our method presents significant improvements on the test dataset collected from MSCOCO and OpenImage, validating the effectiveness of our proposed method in SOE. In particular, when comparing SOEDiff with SD-I model on the OpenImage-small-val dataset, we observe a 0.99 improvement in CLIP-Score and a reduction of 2.87 in FID.