M^3:Manipulation Mask Manufacturer for Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution Mask

In the field of image manipulation localization (IML), the small quantity and poor quality of existing datasets have always been major issues. A dataset containing various types of manipulations will greatly help improve the accuracy of IML models. Images on the internet (such as those on Baidu Tieba's PS Bar) are manipulated using various techniques, and creating a dataset from these images will significantly enrich the types of manipulations in our data. However, images on the internet suffer from resolution and clarity issues, and the masks obtained by simply subtracting the manipulated image from the original contain various noises. These noises are difficult to remove, rendering the masks unusable for IML models. Inspired by the field of change detection, we treat the original and manipulated images as changes over time for the same image and view the data generation task as a change detection task. However, due to clarity issues between images, conventional change detection models perform poorly. Therefore, we introduced a super-resolution module and proposed the Manipulation Mask Manufacturer (MMM) framework. It enhances the resolution of both the original and tampered images, thereby improving image details for better comparison. Simultaneously, the framework converts the original and tampered images into feature embeddings and concatenates them, effectively modeling the context. Additionally, we created the Manipulation Mask Manufacturer Dataset (MMMD), a dataset that covers a wide range of manipulation techniques. We aim to contribute to the fields of image forensics and manipulation detection by providing more realistic manipulation data through MMM and MMMD. Detailed information about MMMD and the download link can be found at: the code and datasets will be made available.

IMDL-BenCo: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Codebase for Image Manipulation Detection & Localization

A comprehensive benchmark is yet to be established in the Image Manipulation Detection \& Localization (IMDL) field. The absence of such a benchmark leads to insufficient and misleading model evaluations, severely undermining the development of this field. However, the scarcity of open-sourced baseline models and inconsistent training and evaluation protocols make conducting rigorous experiments and faithful comparisons among IMDL models challenging. To address these challenges, we introduce IMDL-BenCo, the first comprehensive IMDL benchmark and modular codebase. IMDL-BenCo:~\textbf{i)} decomposes the IMDL framework into standardized, reusable components and revises the model construction pipeline, improving coding efficiency and customization flexibility;~\textbf{ii)} fully implements or incorporates training code for state-of-the-art models to establish a comprehensive IMDL benchmark; and~\textbf{iii)} conducts deep analysis based on the established benchmark and codebase, offering new insights into IMDL model architecture, dataset characteristics, and evaluation standards. Specifically, IMDL-BenCo includes common processing algorithms, 8 state-of-the-art IMDL models (1 of which are reproduced from scratch), 2 sets of standard training and evaluation protocols, 15 GPU-accelerated evaluation metrics, and 3 kinds of robustness evaluation. This benchmark and codebase represent a significant leap forward in calibrating the current progress in the IMDL field and inspiring future breakthroughs. Code is available at: https://github.com/scu-zjz/IMDLBenCo

Perceptual MAE for Image Manipulation Localization: A High-level Vision Learner Focusing on Low-level Features

Nowadays, multimedia forensics faces unprecedented challenges due to the rapid advancement of multimedia generation technology thereby making Image Manipulation Localization (IML) crucial in the pursuit of truth. The key to IML lies in revealing the artifacts or inconsistencies between the tampered and authentic areas, which are evident under pixel-level features. Consequently, existing studies treat IML as a low-level vision task, focusing on allocating tampered masks by crafting pixel-level features such as image RGB noises, edge signals, or high-frequency features. However, in practice, tampering commonly occurs at the object level, and different classes of objects have varying likelihoods of becoming targets of tampering. Therefore, object semantics are also vital in identifying the tampered areas in addition to pixel-level features. This necessitates IML models to carry out a semantic understanding of the entire image. In this paper, we reformulate the IML task as a high-level vision task that greatly benefits from low-level features. Based on such an interpretation, we propose a method to enhance the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) by incorporating high-resolution inputs and a perceptual loss supervision module, which is termed Perceptual MAE (PMAE). While MAE has demonstrated an impressive understanding of object semantics, PMAE can also compensate for low-level semantics with our proposed enhancements. Evidenced by extensive experiments, this paradigm effectively unites the low-level and high-level features of the IML task and outperforms state-of-the-art tampering localization methods on all five publicly available datasets.

Pre-training-free Image Manipulation Localization through Non-Mutually Exclusive Contrastive Learning

Deep Image Manipulation Localization (IML) models suffer from training data insufficiency and thus heavily rely on pre-training. We argue that contrastive learning is more suitable to tackle the data insufficiency problem for IML. Crafting mutually exclusive positives and negatives is the prerequisite for contrastive learning. However, when adopting contrastive learning in IML, we encounter three categories of image patches: tampered, authentic, and contour patches. Tampered and authentic patches are naturally mutually exclusive, but contour patches containing both tampered and authentic pixels are non-mutually exclusive to them. Simply abnegating these contour patches results in a drastic performance loss since contour patches are decisive to the learning outcomes. Hence, we propose the Non-mutually exclusive Contrastive Learning (NCL) framework to rescue conventional contrastive learning from the above dilemma. In NCL, to cope with the non-mutually exclusivity, we first establish a pivot structure with dual branches to constantly switch the role of contour patches between positives and negatives while training. Then, we devise a pivot-consistent loss to avoid spatial corruption caused by the role-switching process. In this manner, NCL both inherits the self-supervised merits to address the data insufficiency and retains a high manipulation localization accuracy. Extensive experiments verify that our NCL achieves state-of-the-art performance on all five benchmarks without any pre-training and is more robust on unseen real-life samples. The code is available at: https://github.com/Knightzjz/NCL-IML.

IML-ViT: Benchmarking Image Manipulation Localization by Vision Transformer

Advanced image tampering techniques are increasingly challenging the trustworthiness of multimedia, leading to the development of Image Manipulation Localization (IML). But what makes a good IML model? The answer lies in the way to capture artifacts. Exploiting artifacts requires the model to extract non-semantic discrepancies between manipulated and authentic regions, necessitating explicit comparisons between the two areas. With the self-attention mechanism, naturally, the Transformer should be a better candidate to capture artifacts. However, due to limited datasets, there is currently no pure ViT-based approach for IML to serve as a benchmark, and CNNs dominate the entire task. Nevertheless, CNNs suffer from weak long-range and non-semantic modeling. To bridge this gap, based on the fact that artifacts are sensitive to image resolution, amplified under multi-scale features, and massive at the manipulation border, we formulate the answer to the former question as building a ViT with high-resolution capacity, multi-scale feature extraction capability, and manipulation edge supervision that could converge with a small amount of data. We term this simple but effective ViT paradigm IML-ViT, which has significant potential to become a new benchmark for IML. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets verified our model outperforms the state-of-the-art manipulation localization methods.Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/SunnyHaze/IML-ViT}.

GReS: Graphical Cross-domain Recommendation for Supply Chain Platform

Supply Chain Platforms (SCPs) provide downstream industries with numerous raw materials. Compared with traditional e-commerce platforms, data in SCPs is more sparse due to limited user interests. To tackle the data sparsity problem, one can apply Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) which improves the recommendation performance of the target domain with the source domain information. However, applying CDR to SCPs directly ignores the hierarchical structure of commodities in SCPs, which reduce the recommendation performance. To leverage this feature, in this paper, we take the catering platform as an example and propose GReS, a graphical cross-domain recommendation model. The model first constructs a tree-shaped graph to represent the hierarchy of different nodes of dishes and ingredients, and then applies our proposed Tree2vec method combining GCN and BERT models to embed the graph for recommendations. Experimental results on a commercial dataset show that GReS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in Cross-Domain Recommendation for Supply Chain Platforms.