# Omni-IML: Towards Unified Image Manipulation Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14823 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14823/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [Advances in Pre-Training Distributed Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09405/) (2017)
- [ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Reading Chinese Text on Signboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09641/) (2019)
- [MVSS-Net: Multi-View Multi-Scale Supervised Networks for Image Manipulation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08935/) (2021)
- [Explicit Visual Prompting for Low-Level Structure Segmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10883/) (2023)
- [FFAA: Multimodal Large Language Model based Explainable Open-World Face Forgery Analysis Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10072/) (2024)
- [OpenForensics: Large-Scale Challenging Dataset For Multi-Face Forgery Detection And Segmentation In-The-Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14480/) (2021)
- [AutoSplice: A Text-prompt Manipulated Image Dataset for Media Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06870/) (2023)
- [IMDL-BenCo: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Codebase for Image Manipulation Detection & Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10580/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Tampered Scene Text Detection in the Era of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21422/) (2024)
- [MultiTask-CenterNet (MCN): Efficient and Diverse Multitask Learning using an Anchor Free Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05060/) (2021)
- [DA-HFNet: Progressive Fine-Grained Forgery Image Detection and Localization Based on Dual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01489/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [TextShield-R1: Reinforced Reasoning for Tampered Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19828/) (2026)
- [Webly-Supervised Image Manipulation Localization via Category-Aware Auto-Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20987/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Image Manipulation Localization under Realistic Manipulation Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20006/) (2025)
- [RelayFormer: A Unified Local-Global Attention Framework for Scalable Image and Video Manipulation Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09459/) (2025)
- [EfficientIML: Efficient High-Resolution Image Manipulation Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08583/) (2025)
- [Efficient Document Tampering Localization with Multi-Level Discrepancy Features and Unified DCT-Quantization Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22285/) (2026)
- [Agents That Edit Documents: Measuring Agentic PDF Forgery Against a Non-Agentic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23953/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing Image Manipulation Localization (IML) methods mostly rely heavily on task-specific designs, making them perform well only on the target IML task, while joint training on multiple IML tasks causes significant performance degradation, hindering real applications. To this end, we propose Omni-IML, the first generalist model designed to unify IML across diverse tasks. Specifically, Omni-IML achieves generalization through three key components: (1) a Modal Gate Encoder, which adaptively selects the optimal encoding modality per sample, (2) a Dynamic Weight Decoder, which dynamically adjusts decoder filters to the task at hand, and (3) an Anomaly Enhancement module that leverages box supervision to highlight the tampered regions and facilitate the learning of task-agnostic features. Beyond localization, to support interpretation of the tampered images, we construct Omni-273k, a large high-quality dataset that includes natural language descriptions of tampered artifact. It is annotated through our automatic, chain-of-thoughts annotation technique. We also design a simple-yet-effective interpretation module to better utilize these descriptive annotations. Our extensive experiments show that our single Omni-IML model achieves state-of-the-art performance across all four major IML tasks, providing a valuable solution for practical deployment and a promising direction of generalist models in image forensics. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.