Efficient and Faithful High-Resolution Image Editing with Sparse Cross-Resolution Denoising

arXiv:2611.04416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instruction-based image editors still primarily operate at 1K, whereas practical editing increasingly requires faithful 2K/4K outputs. Dense high-resolution adaptation preserves the editing trajectory but incurs expensive target-source attention; editing at 1K followed by external refinement is cheaper but can separate detail restoration from the editing trajectory. We introduce FLASH, a native high-resolution editor based on sparse cross-resolution denoising. A frozen 1K branch provides a semantic and structural anchor, while a target-resolution branch reconstructs local detail within the same Transformer. An asymmetric topology retains full 1K attention, guides high-resolution queries with spatially aligned low-resolution noisy-target states, and confines high-resolution target-reference interaction to local Halo neighborhoods. Resolution-specific diffusion-state mapping and spatial YaRN adapt the pretrained editor to larger grids. An optional, training-free progressive path replaces early high-resolution denoising with a 1K prefix and completes refinement in the same editor. On VINS-4KEval, the direct model achieves the strongest structural fidelity among the compared methods at both 2K and 4K. A separate 4K forward benchmark with R = 1 records 4.2x faster total forward execution and 25.3x faster attention than dense target-reference attention. Progressive inference reduces end-to-end 4K latency by 30.5%, with a modest quality cost.