The paper investigates an agentic framework for open‑world fake image detection that combines specialist detectors with per‑detector triage, prompting, and conflict‑aware evidence arbitration. Experiments across six configurations and three multimodal large language model backbones reveal that naive detector fusion yields high false‑positive rates, while triage and prompting consistently filter unreliable evidence. The most significant improvement comes from the reasoning component: a stronger judge markedly outperforms a weaker one, especially under distribution shift, and overall manipulation recall is nearly saturated, highlighting that the key challenge lies in calibrating trust and arbitrating conflicting forensic evidence rather than detecting manipulations themselves.
By Xianlong Li (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy), Pietro Bongini (University of Siena, Italy), Niccol\'o Pancino (University of Siena, Italy), Marco Blanchini (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy), Benedetta Tondi (University of Siena, Italy), Mauro Barni (University of Siena, Italy)
arXiv:2609.39066v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Conventional image forgery detection methods produce binary scores or pixel-level masks without interpretable evidence, while recent multimodal large l...
By Zhiya Tan, Jing Huang, Changtao Miao, Lin Tan, Xin Zhang, Weiwei Feng, Jianshu Li, Joey Tianyi Zhou
arXiv:2606. 26552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of generative models presents a significant challenge to existing deepfake detection methods, particularly given the widespread dissemination of highly realistic AI-generated images.
By Yangjun Wu, Keyu Yan, Yu Liu, Jingren Zhou, Fei Huang, Rong Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Fei Wu
arXiv:2609.37783v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Photographic evidence is becoming increasingly vulnerable to forms of alteration and fabrication that existing legal and technical workflows are not...
By Kelly McConvey, Sajad Ebrahimi, Nima Jamali, Jalehsadat Mahdavimoghaddam, Matina Mahdizadeh Sani, Maksym Taranukhin, Wentao Zhang, Jacquelyn Burkell, Yuntian Deng, Karen Eltis, Maura R. Grossman, Vered Shwartz, Ebrahim Bagheri
arXiv:2502. 19716v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in visual generative models have enabled the creation of highly realistic, fully AI-generated images without relying on real source content.
By Qijie Xu, Can Wang, Jiawei Chen, Siwei Lyu, Defang Chen
The paper introduces RED (Reconstruction Evolution Dynamics), a new framework for detecting AI-generated images that leverages the evolution of intermediate reconstruction stages rather than relying solely on static representations or endpoint discrepancies. RED uses a frozen multiscale VQ‑VAE and a frozen CLIP encoder to capture a reconstruction trajectory, then learns image‑adaptive stage weights from token negative log‑likelihoods provided by a frozen VAR model. Experiments on six benchmarks show RED achieves the highest average accuracy (92.5%) and precision (97.5%) among evaluated methods, and it remains robust to common image degradations.
By Wenpeng Mu, Junshan Jin, Tanfeng Sun, Xinghao Jiang, Qiang Xu
arXiv:2608. 06865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The malicious use of generative artificial intelligence to create highly realistic deepfake videos raises serious ethical concerns and poses substantial challenges to AI safety.
By Xuechao Zou, Shun Zhang, Kai Li, Yi Zhou, Xinyu Sun, Yuhui Chen, Zhe Wu, Congyan Lang, Junliang Xing
arXiv:2608. 12876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Detecting AI-generated images is only half the task: a deployed detector must also justify its verdict, yet existing detectors inherit three failure modes from their training data: real and fake images collected from different sources invite provenance shortcuts, supervised explanation corpora teach templated rationales, and a static forgery corpus leaves the decision boundary standing still while generators keep moving.
By Yicheng Bao, Xiahui Guo, Xuhong Wang, Xin Tan
arXiv:2512. 16300v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing image forgery detection (IFD) methods either exploit low-level, semantics-agnostic artifacts or rely on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with high-level semantic knowledge.
By Fanrui Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Sizhuo Zhou, Jianwen Sun, Chuanhao Li, Jiaxin Ai, Yukang Feng, Yujie Zhang, Wenjie Li, Zizhen Li, Yifan Chang, Jiawei Liu, Kaipeng Zhang
arXiv:2609.38251v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The rapid evolution of image manipulation techniques has raised growing public security concerns. Existing Image Forgery Localization (IFL) methods c...
By Chenqi Kong, Song Xia, Anwei Luo, Peisong He, Alex C. Kot, Yuming Fang
FUSED is a new framework that jointly detects and localizes AI-generated inpainting by combining low-level forensic cues with high-level semantic features through a sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts architecture. It predicts both an image-level manipulation score and a pixel-level mask of the inpainted region. On the OpenSDID cross-generator benchmark, FUSED outperforms existing methods, especially on unseen generators, and transfers effectively to the AutoSplice and CocoGlide benchmarks, doubling localization performance.
By Anton Nuzhdin, Marcel Worring, Ivona Najdenkoska
The paper introduces MoE-JEPA, a dual‑stream deepfake detection model that combines a V‑JEPA backbone with a Residual Mixture‑of‑Experts mechanism and a noise stream branch. It further incorporates a Gated Attention Multiple Instance Learning module to refine spatial semantic understanding. On the SID‑Set benchmark, MoE‑JEPA achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art accuracy of 95.54%, outperforming much larger models.
By Simone Teglia, Irene Amerini