LightningDrag: Lightning Fast and Accurate Drag-based Image Editing Emerging from Videos

Yujun Shi, J. Liew, Hanshu Yan, Vincent Y. F. Tan, Jiashi Feng
2/12/2026

No official code found. Best implementation: magic-research/LightningDrag (87 stars, Apache-2.0, last commit 2024-10-23).

Abstract

Accuracy and speed are critical in image editing tasks. Pan et al. introduced a drag-based image editing framework that achieves pixel-level control using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). A flurry of subsequent studies enhanced this framework's generality by leveraging large-scale diffusion models. However, these methods often suffer from inordinately long processing times (exceeding 1 minute per edit) and low success rates. Addressing these issues head on, we present LightningDrag, a rapid approach enabling high quality drag-based image editing in ~1 second. Unlike most previous methods, we redefine drag-based editing as a conditional generation task, eliminating the need for time-consuming latent optimization or gradient-based guidance during inference. In addition, the design of our pipeline allows us to train our model on large-scale paired video frames, which contain rich motion information such as object translations, changing poses and orientations, zooming in and out, etc. By learning from videos, our approach can significantly outperform previous methods in terms of accuracy and consistency. Despite being trained solely on videos, our model generalizes well to perform local shape deformations not presented in the training data (e.g., lengthening of hair, twisting rainbows, etc.). Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on benchmark datasets corroborate the superiority of our approach. The code and model will be released at https://github.com/magic-research/LightningDrag.

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Code Implementations(1)

Apache-2.0

Experiencing lightning fast (~1s) and accurate drag-based image editing

875PythonSep 16, 20241 years agoApache-2.0

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Cite this paper

@article{shi2026lightningdrag,
  title  = {LightningDrag: Lightning Fast and Accurate Drag-based Image Editing Emerging from Videos},
  author = {Yujun Shi and J. Liew and Hanshu Yan and Vincent Y. F. Tan and Jiashi Feng},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2405.13722},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13722},
  journal = {ICML 2024 2024}
}

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