Title: Bridging Modalities for Forgery Detection via Learnable Representations with Query-Guided Contrastive Learning
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: image manipulation localization, forged representation, bidirectional cross-attention, contrastive learning

Abstract: Image manipulation localization (IML) aims to identify tampered regions in edited images, which may range from object-level composites to subtle traces. Recent studies have began to explore the integration of multi-source cues, such as RGB, high frequency and noises, in pursuit of more precise localization. Despite this progress, the potential of cross-modal interactions and hierarchical perceptions deserves deeper investigation and exploitation. 
Inspired by how humans detect forgeries through dynamic zooming to capture holistic-local and semantic-detail cues, we propose BriQ (Bridge-Modality Query), a query-based framework that learns forged-aware representations to perceive multi-scale information. Meanwhile, we incorporate a structured attention to effectively model cross-modal interactions. 
To further enhance discriminative capability, we introduce query-to-regions contrastive learning (Q2R), which encourages representations to capture the essential contrast between tampered and authentic regions and aggregate forgery-related features, thereby significantly improving IML task performance. 
Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets validate BriQ's state-of-the-art effectiveness and robustness, while comprehensive ablation studies confirm the contributions of each component.