Can We Model the Artifacts Explicitly? Disentangle Artifacts via Pairwise Edit Relations for Image Manipulation Localization
This study addresses the performance bottleneck in image forgery localization caused by the implicit modeling of artifacts, reformulating the task as a latent variable problem and proposing a two-stage paradigm to explicitly model tampering artifacts. Methodologically, it introduces paired artifact learning alongside standard localization strategies, and designs an edit-relation-based feature disentanglement mechanism that effectively separates content from artifact representations. Additionally, a large-scale dataset, EditGroup-45K, is constructed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach not only significantly enhances the localization performance of various mainstream models but also thoroughly validates its capability to explicitly capture tampering artifacts.