FORGE is a forensic deepfake analysis system that provides region‑grounded natural language explanations for image manipulations. It addresses the inductive bias mismatch of multimodal large language models by adding a Vision‑Only Model trained on dense patch prediction, allowing the language model to interleave tokens with preserved spatial correspondence. Across face‑manipulated and fully synthetic content, FORGE delivers fine‑grained attribute queries and outperforms in‑domain baselines, with region‑specific evaluation and human studies confirming explanation faithfulness.
By Rohit Kundu, Shan Jia, Vishal Mohanty, Athula Balachandran, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury
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:2604. 02694v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid progress of generative AI has enabled increasingly realistic text-centric image forgeries, posing major challenges to document safety.
By Fanwei Zeng, Changtao Miao, Jing Huang, Zhiya Tan, Shutao Gong, Xiaoming Yu, Yang Wang, Weibin Yao, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Jianshu Li, Ying Yan
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
The paper introduces an evidence‑guided detector‑localizer‑reasoner system for text‑centric image forensics, addressing the challenges posed by AI‑generated content. It combines an image‑level authenticity detector, a localizer that extracts tampered regions, and an MLLM‑based reasoner that generates structured forensic reports grounded in the detected evidence. The system employs iterative difficulty‑aware mining and report‑mask consistency post‑processing, achieving a score of 0.638 and ranking second in the ACM Multimedia 2026 GenText‑Forensics Challenge.
By Peifeng Liu, Bin Li, Qingsong Zhang, Yangxin Yu, Leqing Chen, Xiaoye Qiu
ManiVid introduces a unified forensic analysis framework for manipulated videos, combining forgery detection, artifact grounding, and anomaly explanation. The authors release ManiVid-38K, a large dataset of 19K real‑fake video pairs with authenticity labels, forgery masks, and explanations, and a benchmark ManiVidBench with 1K balanced pairs. ManiVidLens, the proposed model, outperforms existing methods in artifact grounding and anomaly explanation while matching state‑of‑the‑art detection accuracy.
By Hengrui Kang, Zhonghao Yan, Yuxuan Yang, Ruoyan Jing, Yuncheng Guo, Hao Chen, Kongming Liang, Zhanyu Ma, Conghui He, Weijia Li