SANA I2I: A Text Free Flow Matching Framework for Paired Image to Image Translation with a Case Study in Fetal MRI Artifact Reduction

arXiv cs.AI / 4/2/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces SANA-I2I, a text-free, paired image-to-image translation framework that removes textual conditioning and learns purely from source-target image pairs.
  • It extends the SANA line by training a conditional flow-matching model in latent space, learning a velocity field that transforms a source image distribution into a target distribution.
  • The method is evaluated on fetal MRI motion artifact reduction, where preserving anatomical structure while suppressing artifacts is particularly challenging.
  • To address the difficulty of obtaining real paired fetal MRI data, the authors generate synthetic paired training data by simulating realistic motion artifacts using an approach based on prior work.
  • Results indicate effective artifact suppression with competitive quality and few inference steps, suggesting flow-based text-free models are well-suited for supervised medical imaging translation tasks.

Abstract

We propose SANA-I2I, a text-free high-resolution image-to-image generation framework that extends the SANA family by removing textual conditioning entirely. In contrast to SanaControlNet, which combines text and image-based control, SANA-I2I relies exclusively on paired source-target images to learn a conditional flow-matching model in latent space. The model learns a conditional velocity field that maps a target image distribution to another one, enabling supervised image translation without reliance on language prompts. We evaluate the proposed approach on the challenging task of fetal MRI motion artifact reduction. To enable paired training in this application, where real paired data are difficult to acquire, we adopt a synthetic data generation strategy based on the method proposed by Duffy et al., which simulates realistic motion artifacts in fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Experimental results demonstrate that SANA-I2I effectively suppresses motion artifacts while preserving anatomical structure, achieving competitive performance few inference steps. These results highlight the efficiency and suitability of our proposed flow-based, text-free generative models for supervised image-to-image tasks in medical imaging.

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