ChronoEdit
ChronoEdit is an image editing model that thinks about physics. Instead of just making changes to your image, it reasons about how those changes would actually happen in the real world.
How it works
Most image editing models treat each image independently. ChronoEdit does something different: it treats your input image and the edited result as the first and last frames of a short video. This lets it think through the physical transformation between them.
When you give ChronoEdit an image and a prompt like “add sunglasses to the cat’s face,” it doesn’t just paste sunglasses onto the image. It imagines how the sunglasses would naturally appear on the cat, considering lighting, shadows, and how objects interact in three-dimensional space.
What makes it special
ChronoEdit uses temporal reasoning tokens—intermediate frames that help the model “think through” your edit. These tokens guide the model to produce changes that follow physical laws. For example, if you ask it to move an object, it understands that the object can’t just teleport—it needs to move in a way that makes sense given gravity, momentum, and the scene around it.
The model is built on top of pretrained video generation models. This gives it an understanding of how things move and change over time, which translates into more realistic and physically consistent edits.
When to use it
ChronoEdit is particularly good at edits that need to respect physical reality:
- Adding or removing objects from scenes where lighting and shadows matter
- Moving objects in ways that look natural
- Changing materials or textures while maintaining realistic reflections and interactions
- Making edits to scenes that will be used in simulations, like autonomous vehicle training or robotics
- Any edit where physical consistency is more important than pure creativity
About the model
ChronoEdit was developed by NVIDIA’s Toronto AI Lab. This implementation uses the 14 billion parameter version of the model. The original research introduced a new benchmark called PBench-Edit specifically for testing how well models maintain physical consistency during edits.
You can read more about the research in the original paper or visit the project page.
Try ChronoEdit on the Replicate playground.