# CLUE: Leveraging Low-Rank Adaptation to Capture Latent Uncovered Evidence for Image Forgery Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07413 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07413/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 11 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [MVSS-Net: Multi-View Multi-Scale Supervised Networks for Image Manipulation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08935/) (2021)
- [Image Manipulation Detection by Multi-View Multi-Scale Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06832/) (2021)
- [AutoSplice: A Text-prompt Manipulated Image Dataset for Media Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06870/) (2023)
- [Pixel-Inconsistency Modeling for Image Manipulation Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00234/) (2023)
- [Self-Adversarial Training incorporating Forgery Attention for Image Forgery Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02434/) (2021)
- [SAFIRE: Segment Any Forged Image Region](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08197/) (2024)
- [MESA: Matching Everything by Segmenting Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16741/) (2024)
- [Exploring Multi-view Pixel Contrast for General and Robust Image Forgery Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13565/) (2024)
- [DeiSAM: Segment Anything with Deictic Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14123/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Universal Anti-forensics Attack against Image Forgery Detection via Multi-modal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06530/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The increasing accessibility of image editing tools and generative AI has led to a proliferation of visually convincing forgeries, compromising the authenticity of digital media. In this paper, in addition to leveraging distortions from conventional forgeries, we repurpose the mechanism of a state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-image synthesis model by exploiting its internal generative process, turning it into a high-fidelity forgery localization tool. To this end, we propose CLUE (Capture Latent Uncovered Evidence), a framework that employs Low- Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to parameter-efficiently reconfigure Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3) as a forensic feature extractor. Our approach begins with the strategic use of SD3's Rectified Flow (RF) mechanism to inject noise at varying intensities into the latent representation, thereby steering the LoRAtuned denoising process to amplify subtle statistical inconsistencies indicative of a forgery. To complement the latent analysis with high-level semantic context and precise spatial details, our method incorporates contextual features from the image encoder of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which is parameter-efficiently adapted to better trace the boundaries of forged regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate CLUE's SOTA generalization performance, significantly outperforming prior methods. Furthermore, CLUE shows superior robustness against common post-processing attacks and Online Social Networks (OSNs). Code is publicly available at https://github.com/SZAISEC/CLUE.