SIGMA: Semantic-Difference Instruction-Grounding Mask Annotator for Text-Driven Image Manipulation Localization

Text-driven image editing has advanced rapidly, but reliably localizing these manipulations requires image manipulation localization (IML) models trained on large pixel-annotated datasets, and there is still no low-cost way to obtain such training data at scale. We observe that these data already exist in disguise: public editing datasets contain millions of structurally identical $\textit{(original, edited)}$ pairs to IML training samples, lacking only pixel-level masks. Recovering these masks automatically is non-trivial: pixel differencing is overwhelmed by diffusion-induced perturbations across all pixels, and instruction-only grounding localizes only what the prompt describes, missing unintended editor side-effects. We propose $\textbf{SIGMA}$ ($\textbf{S}$emantic-difference $\textbf{I}$nstruction-$\textbf{G}$rounding $\textbf{M}$ask $\textbf{A}$nnotator), which performs semantic-feature differencing in a vision foundation backbone and injects an instruction-derived spatial prior into this visual stream via bidirectional cross-modal refinement, amplifying the difference signal at intended-edit regions when the editor faithfully realizes user intent. SIGMA is trained in two complementary stages: Stage I supervises on inpainting masks; Stage II closes the diffusion-domain shift via VAE-roundtrip noise calibration, EMA self-training, and an edit-noise disentanglement loss. SIGMA outperforms existing automatic mask generators on five benchmarks ($\textbf{+12.20\%}$ F1, $\textbf{+11.16\%}$ IoU). When applied to public editing corpora, it produces a $\sim$1.1M IML training set that improves six diverse detectors by $\textbf{+18.34\%}$ F1 across five datasets, turning previously unused editing data into a model-agnostic supervisory resource for IML. For reproducibility, our anonymized code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SIGMA-14FE.