Abstract
Image forgery localization aims to precisely identify tampered regions within images, but it commonly depends on costly pixel-level annotations. To alleviate this annotation burden, weakly supervised image forgery localization (WSIFL) has emerged, yet existing methods still achieve limited localization performance as they mainly exploit intra-image consistency clues and lack external semantic guidance to compensate for weak supervision. In this paper, we propose ViLaCo, a vision-language collaborative reasoning framework that introduces auxiliary semantic supervision distilled from pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), enabling accurate pixel-level localization using only image-level labels. Specifically, ViLaCo first incorporates semantic knowledge through a vision-language feature modeling network, which jointly extracts textual and visual priors using pre-trained VLMs. Next, an adaptive vision-language reasoning network aligns textual semantics and visual features through mutua