Deep learning-based image manipulation localization (IML) methods have achieved remarkable performance in recent years, but typically rely on large-scale pixel-level annotated datasets. To address the challenge of acquiring high-quality annotations, some recent weakly supervised methods utilize image-level labels to segment manipulated regions. However, the performance is still limited due to insufficient supervision signals. In this study, we explore a form of weak supervision that improves the annotation efficiency and detection performance, namely scribble annotation supervision. We re-annotated mainstream IML datasets with scribble labels and propose the first scribble-based IML (Sc-IML) dataset. Additionally, we propose the first scribble-based weakly supervised IML framework. Specifically, we employ self-supervised training with a structural consistency loss to encourage the model to produce consistent predictions under multi-scale and augmented inputs. In addition, we propose a prior-aware feature modulation module (PFMM) that adaptively integrates prior information from both manipulated and authentic regions for dynamic feature adjustment, further enhancing feature discriminability and prediction consistency in complex scenes. We also propose a gated adaptive fusion module (GAFM) that utilizes gating mechanisms to regulate information flow during feature fusion, guiding the model toward emphasizing potential tampered regions. Finally, we propose a confidence-aware entropy minimization loss (${\mathcal{L}}_{ {CEM }}$). This loss dynamically regularizes predictions in weakly annotated or unlabeled regions based on model uncertainty, effectively suppressing unreliable predictions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing fully supervised approaches in terms of average performance both in-distribution and out-of-distribution.
Changing facial expressions, gestures, or background details may dramatically alter the meaning conveyed by an image. Notably, recent advances in diffusion models greatly improve the quality of image manipulation while also opening the door to misuse. Identifying changes made to authentic images, thus, becomes an important task, constantly challenged by new diffusion-based editing tools. To this end, we propose a novel approach for ReliAble iDentification of inpainted AReas (RADAR). RADAR builds on existing foundation models and combines features from different image modalities. It also incorporates an auxiliary contrastive loss that helps to isolate manipulated image patches. We demonstrate these techniques to significantly improve both the accuracy of our method and its generalisation to a large number of diffusion models. To support realistic evaluation, we further introduce BBC-PAIR, a new comprehensive benchmark, with images tampered by 28 diffusion models. Our experiments show that RADAR achieves excellent results, outperforming the state-of-the-art in detecting and localising image edits made by both seen and unseen diffusion models. Our code, data and models will be publicly available at https://alex-costanzino.github.io/radar/.
Although existing unified models achieve strong performance in vision-language understanding and text-to-image generation, they remain limited in addressing image perception and manipulation -- capabilities increasingly demanded in practical applications. Recently, OpenAI introduced the powerful GPT-4o-Image model, which showcases advanced capabilities in comprehensive image perception and manipulation, sparking widespread interest. Through carefully designed experiments, we observe that GPT-4o-Image likely relies on semantic encoders rather than VAEs for feature extraction, despite VAEs being commonly regarded as crucial for image manipulation tasks. Inspired by this insight, we propose UniWorld-V1, a unified generative framework built upon semantic features extracted from powerful multimodal large language models and contrastive semantic encoders. Using only 2.7M training data, UniWorld-V1 achieves impressive performance across diverse tasks, including image understanding, generation, manipulation, and perception. We fully open-source the UniWorld-V1 framework, including model weights, training and evaluation scripts, and datasets to promote reproducibility and further research.
The explosive growth of digital images and the widespread availability of image editing tools have made image manipulation detection an increasingly critical challenge. Current deep learning-based manipulation detection methods excel in achieving high image-level classification accuracy, they often fall short in terms of interpretability and localization of manipulated regions. Additionally, the absence of pixel-wise annotations in real-world scenarios limits the existing fully-supervised manipulation localization techniques. To address these challenges, we propose a novel weakly-supervised approach that integrates activation maps generated by image-level manipulation detection networks with segmentation maps from pre-trained models. Specifically, we build on our previous image-level work named WCBnet to produce multi-view feature maps which are subsequently fused for coarse localization. These coarse maps are then refined using detailed segmented regional information provided by pre-trained segmentation models (such as DeepLab, SegmentAnything and PSPnet), with Bayesian inference employed to enhance the manipulation localization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting the feasibility to localize image manipulations without relying on pixel-level labels.
The rapid advancement of native multi-modal models and omni-models, exemplified by GPT-4o, Gemini, and o3, with their capability to process and generate content across modalities such as text and images, marks a significant milestone in the evolution of intelligence. Systematic evaluation of their multi-modal output capabilities in visual thinking processes (also known as multi-modal chain of thought, M-CoT) becomes critically important. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating multi-modal models primarily focus on assessing multi-modal inputs and text-only reasoning while neglecting the importance of reasoning through multi-modal outputs. In this paper, we present a benchmark, dubbed RBench-V, designed to assess models' vision-indispensable reasoning abilities. To construct RBench-V, we carefully hand-pick 803 questions covering math, physics, counting, and games. Unlike previous benchmarks that typically specify certain input modalities, RBench-V presents problems centered on multi-modal outputs, which require image manipulation such as generating novel images and constructing auxiliary lines to support the reasoning process. We evaluate numerous open- and closed-source models on RBench-V, including o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen2.5-VL, etc. Even the best-performing model, o3, achieves only 25.8% accuracy on RBench-V, far below the human score of 82.3%, highlighting that current models struggle to leverage multi-modal reasoning. Data and code are available at https://evalmodels.github.io/rbenchv
The proliferation of diffusion-based deepfake technologies poses significant risks for unauthorized and unethical facial image manipulation. While traditional countermeasures have primarily focused on passive detection methods, this paper introduces a novel proactive defense strategy through adversarial attacks that preemptively protect facial images from being exploited by diffusion-based deepfake systems. Existing adversarial protection methods predominantly target conventional generative architectures (GANs, AEs, VAEs) and fail to address the unique challenges presented by diffusion models, which have become the predominant framework for high-quality facial deepfakes. Current diffusion-specific adversarial approaches are limited by their reliance on specific model architectures and weights, rendering them ineffective against the diverse landscape of diffusion-based deepfake implementations. Additionally, they typically employ global perturbation strategies that inadequately address the region-specific nature of facial manipulation in deepfakes.
Unifying multimodal understanding and generation has shown impressive capabilities in cutting-edge proprietary systems. In this work, we introduce BAGEL, an open0source foundational model that natively supports multimodal understanding and generation. BAGEL is a unified, decoder0only model pretrained on trillions of tokens curated from large0scale interleaved text, image, video, and web data. When scaled with such diverse multimodal interleaved data, BAGEL exhibits emerging capabilities in complex multimodal reasoning. As a result, it significantly outperforms open-source unified models in both multimodal generation and understanding across standard benchmarks, while exhibiting advanced multimodal reasoning abilities such as free-form image manipulation, future frame prediction, 3D manipulation, and world navigation. In the hope of facilitating further opportunities for multimodal research, we share the key findings, pretraining details, data creation protocal, and release our code and checkpoints to the community. The project page is at https://bagel-ai.org/
A key trend in Large Reasoning Models (e.g., OpenAI's o3) is the native agentic ability to use external tools such as web browsers for searching and writing/executing code for image manipulation to think with images. In the open-source research community, while significant progress has been made in language-only agentic abilities such as function calling and tool integration, the development of multi-modal agentic capabilities that involve truly thinking with images, and their corresponding benchmarks, are still less explored. This work highlights the effectiveness of Visual Agentic Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-ARFT) for enabling flexible and adaptive reasoning abilities for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). With Visual-ARFT, open-source LVLMs gain the ability to browse websites for real-time information updates and write code to manipulate and analyze input images through cropping, rotation, and other image processing techniques. We also present a Multi-modal Agentic Tool Bench (MAT) with two settings (MAT-Search and MAT-Coding) designed to evaluate LVLMs' agentic search and coding abilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that Visual-ARFT outperforms its baseline by +18.6% F1 / +13.0% EM on MAT-Coding and +10.3% F1 / +8.7% EM on MAT-Search, ultimately surpassing GPT-4o. Visual-ARFT also achieves +29.3 F1% / +25.9% EM gains on existing multi-hop QA benchmarks such as 2Wiki and HotpotQA, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities. Our findings suggest that Visual-ARFT offers a promising path toward building robust and generalizable multimodal agents.
As diffusion-based malicious image manipulation becomes increasingly prevalent, multiple proactive defense methods are developed to safeguard images against unauthorized tampering. However, most proactive defense methods only can safeguard images against manipulation under known conditions, and fail to protect images from manipulations guided by tampering conditions crafted by malicious users. To tackle this issue, we propose Anti-Inpainting, a proactive defense method that achieves adequate protection under unknown conditions through a triple mechanism to address this challenge. Specifically, a multi-level deep feature extractor is presented to obtain intricate features during the diffusion denoising process to improve protective effectiveness. We design multi-scale semantic-preserving data augmentation to enhance the transferability of adversarial perturbations across unknown conditions by multi-scale transformations while preserving semantic integrity. In addition, we propose a selection-based distribution deviation optimization strategy to improve the protection of adversarial perturbation against manipulation under diverse random seeds. Extensive experiments indicate the proactive defensive performance of Anti-Inpainting against diffusion-based inpainters guided by unknown conditions in InpaintGuardBench and CelebA-HQ. At the same time, we also demonstrate the proposed approach's robustness under various image purification methods and its transferability across different versions of diffusion models.
The field of Fake Image Detection and Localization (FIDL) is highly fragmented, encompassing four domains: deepfake detection (Deepfake), image manipulation detection and localization (IMDL), artificial intelligence-generated image detection (AIGC), and document image manipulation localization (Doc). Although individual benchmarks exist in some domains, a unified benchmark for all domains in FIDL remains blank. The absence of a unified benchmark results in significant domain silos, where each domain independently constructs its datasets, models, and evaluation protocols without interoperability, preventing cross-domain comparisons and hindering the development of the entire FIDL field. To close the domain silo barrier, we propose ForensicHub, the first unified benchmark & codebase for all-domain fake image detection and localization. Considering drastic variations on dataset, model, and evaluation configurations across all domains, as well as the scarcity of open-sourced baseline models and the lack of individual benchmarks in some domains, ForensicHub: i) proposes a modular and configuration-driven architecture that decomposes forensic pipelines into interchangeable components across datasets, transforms, models, and evaluators, allowing flexible composition across all domains; ii) fully implements 10 baseline models, 6 backbones, 2 new benchmarks for AIGC and Doc, and integrates 2 existing benchmarks of DeepfakeBench and IMDLBenCo through an adapter-based design; iii) conducts indepth analysis based on the ForensicHub, offering 8 key actionable insights into FIDL model architecture, dataset characteristics, and evaluation standards. ForensicHub represents a significant leap forward in breaking the domain silos in the FIDL field and inspiring future breakthroughs.
Despite significant advances in modeling image priors via diffusion models, 3D-aware image editing remains challenging, in part because the object is only specified via a single image. To tackle this challenge, we propose 3D-Fixup, a new framework for editing 2D images guided by learned 3D priors. The framework supports difficult editing situations such as object translation and 3D rotation. To achieve this, we leverage a training-based approach that harnesses the generative power of diffusion models. As video data naturally encodes real-world physical dynamics, we turn to video data for generating training data pairs, i.e., a source and a target frame. Rather than relying solely on a single trained model to infer transformations between source and target frames, we incorporate 3D guidance from an Image-to-3D model, which bridges this challenging task by explicitly projecting 2D information into 3D space. We design a data generation pipeline to ensure high-quality 3D guidance throughout training. Results show that by integrating these 3D priors, 3D-Fixup effectively supports complex, identity coherent 3D-aware edits, achieving high-quality results and advancing the application of diffusion models in realistic image manipulation. The code is provided at https://3dfixup.github.io/
Generative diffusion models have advanced image editing with high-quality results and intuitive interfaces such as prompts and semantic drawing. However, these interfaces lack precise control, and the associated methods typically specialize on a single editing task. We introduce a versatile, generative workflow that operates in an intrinsic-image latent space, enabling semantic, local manipulation with pixel precision for a range of editing operations. Building atop the RGB-X diffusion framework, we address key challenges of identity preservation and intrinsic-channel entanglement. By incorporating exact diffusion inversion and disentangled channel manipulation, we enable precise, efficient editing with automatic resolution of global illumination effects -- all without additional data collection or model fine-tuning. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across a variety of tasks on complex images, including color and texture adjustments, object insertion and removal, global relighting, and their combinations.
Multi-object editing aims to modify multiple objects or regions in complex scenes while preserving structural coherence. This task faces significant challenges in scenarios involving overlapping or interacting objects: (1) Inaccurate localization of target objects due to attention misalignment, leading to incomplete or misplaced edits; (2) Attribute-object mismatch, where color or texture changes fail to align with intended regions due to cross-attention leakage, creating semantic conflicts (\textit{e.g.}, color bleeding into non-target areas). Existing methods struggle with these challenges: approaches relying on global cross-attention mechanisms suffer from attention dilution and spatial interference between objects, while mask-based methods fail to bind attributes to geometrically accurate regions due to feature entanglement in multi-object scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a training-free, inference-stage optimization approach that enables precise localized image manipulation in complex multi-object scenes, named MDE-Edit. MDE-Edit optimizes the noise latent feature in diffusion models via two key losses: Object Alignment Loss (OAL) aligns multi-layer cross-attention with segmentation masks for precise object positioning, and Color Consistency Loss (CCL) amplifies target attribute attention within masks while suppressing leakage to adjacent regions. This dual-loss design ensures localized and coherent multi-object edits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDE-Edit outperforms state-of-the-art methods in editing accuracy and visual quality, offering a robust solution for complex multi-object image manipulation tasks.
Visual text is a crucial component in both document and scene images, conveying rich semantic information and attracting significant attention in the computer vision community. Beyond traditional tasks such as text detection and recognition, visual text processing has witnessed rapid advancements driven by the emergence of foundation models, including text image reconstruction and text image manipulation. Despite significant progress, challenges remain due to the unique properties that differentiate text from general objects. Effectively capturing and leveraging these distinct textual characteristics is essential for developing robust visual text processing models. In this survey, we present a comprehensive, multi-perspective analysis of recent advancements in visual text processing, focusing on two key questions: (1) What textual features are most suitable for different visual text processing tasks? (2) How can these distinctive text features be effectively incorporated into processing frameworks? Furthermore, we introduce VTPBench, a new benchmark that encompasses a broad range of visual text processing datasets. Leveraging the advanced visual quality assessment capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), we propose VTPScore, a novel evaluation metric designed to ensure fair and reliable evaluation. Our empirical study with more than 20 specific models reveals substantial room for improvement in the current techniques. Our aim is to establish this work as a fundamental resource that fosters future exploration and innovation in the dynamic field of visual text processing. The relevant repository is available at https://github.com/shuyansy/Visual-Text-Processing-survey.
In recent years, image editing models have witnessed remarkable and rapid development. The recent unveiling of cutting-edge multimodal models such as GPT-4o and Gemini2 Flash has introduced highly promising image editing capabilities. These models demonstrate an impressive aptitude for fulfilling a vast majority of user-driven editing requirements, marking a significant advancement in the field of image manipulation. However, there is still a large gap between the open-source algorithm with these closed-source models. Thus, in this paper, we aim to release a state-of-the-art image editing model, called Step1X-Edit, which can provide comparable performance against the closed-source models like GPT-4o and Gemini2 Flash. More specifically, we adopt the Multimodal LLM to process the reference image and the user's editing instruction. A latent embedding has been extracted and integrated with a diffusion image decoder to obtain the target image. To train the model, we build a data generation pipeline to produce a high-quality dataset. For evaluation, we develop the GEdit-Bench, a novel benchmark rooted in real-world user instructions. Experimental results on GEdit-Bench demonstrate that Step1X-Edit outperforms existing open-source baselines by a substantial margin and approaches the performance of leading proprietary models, thereby making significant contributions to the field of image editing.
The rapid development of generative AI facilitates content creation and makes image manipulation easier and more difficult to detect. While multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) have encoded rich world knowledge, they are not inherently tailored for combating AI-generated Content (AIGC) and struggle to comprehend local forgery details. In this work, we investigate the application of multimodal LLMs in forgery detection. We propose a framework capable of evaluating image authenticity, localizing tampered regions, providing evidence, and tracing generation methods based on semantic tampering clues. Our method demonstrates that the potential of LLMs in forgery analysis can be effectively unlocked through meticulous prompt engineering and the application of few-shot learning techniques. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments and show that GPT4V can achieve an accuracy of 92.1% in Autosplice and 86.3% in LaMa, which is competitive with state-of-the-art AIGC detection methods. We further discuss the limitations of multimodal LLMs in such tasks and propose potential improvements.
Recent advances in image generation, particularly diffusion models, have significantly lowered the barrier for creating sophisticated forgeries, making image manipulation detection and localization (IMDL) increasingly challenging. While prior work in IMDL has focused largely on natural images, the anime domain remains underexplored-despite its growing vulnerability to AI-generated forgeries. Misrepresentations of AI-generated images as hand-drawn artwork, copyright violations, and inappropriate content modifications pose serious threats to the anime community and industry. To address this gap, we propose AnimeDL-2M, the first large-scale benchmark for anime IMDL with comprehensive annotations. It comprises over two million images including real, partially manipulated, and fully AI-generated samples. Experiments indicate that models trained on existing IMDL datasets of natural images perform poorly when applied to anime images, highlighting a clear domain gap between anime and natural images. To better handle IMDL tasks in anime domain, we further propose AniXplore, a novel model tailored to the visual characteristics of anime imagery. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that AniXplore achieves superior performance compared to existing methods. Dataset and code can be found in https://flytweety.github.io/AnimeDL2M/.
The rapid advancement of AI-driven visual generation technologies has catalyzed significant breakthroughs in image manipulation, particularly in achieving photorealistic localized editing effects on natural scene images (NSIs). Despite extensive research on image quality assessment (IQA) for AI-generated images (AGIs), most studies focus on fully AI-generated outputs (e.g., text-to-image generation), leaving the quality assessment of partial-AIGC images (PAIs)-images with localized AI-driven edits an almost unprecedented field. Motivated by this gap, we construct the first large-scale PAI dataset towards explainable partial-AIGC image quality assessment (EPAIQA), the EPAIQA-15K, which includes 15K images with localized AI manipulation in different regions and over 300K multi-dimensional human ratings. Based on this, we leverage large multi-modal models (LMMs) and propose a three-stage model training paradigm. This paradigm progressively trains the LMM for editing region grounding, quantitative quality scoring, and quality explanation. Finally, we develop the EPAIQA series models, which possess explainable quality feedback capabilities. Our work represents a pioneering effort in the perceptual IQA field for comprehensive PAI quality assessment.
We present Pro-DG, a framework for procedurally controllable photo-realistic facade generation that combines a procedural shape grammar with diffusion-based image synthesis. Starting from a single input image, we reconstruct its facade layout using grammar rules, then edit that structure through user-defined transformations. As facades are inherently multi-hierarchical structures, we introduce hierarchical matching procedure that aligns facade structures at different levels which is used to introduce control maps to guide a generative diffusion pipeline. This approach retains local appearance fidelity while accommodating large-scale edits such as floor duplication or window rearrangement. We provide a thorough evaluation, comparing Pro-DG against inpainting-based baselines and synthetic ground truths. Our user study and quantitative measurements indicate improved preservation of architectural identity and higher edit accuracy. Our novel method is the first to integrate neuro-symbolically derived shape-grammars for modeling with modern generative model and highlights the broader potential of such approaches for precise and controllable image manipulation.
Diffusion-based generative models, such as Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs), have achieved remarkable success in image generation, but their step-by-step denoising process remains opaque, leaving critical aspects of the generation mechanism unexplained. To address this, we introduce \emph{Patronus}, an interpretable diffusion model inspired by ProtoPNet. Patronus integrates a prototypical network into DDPMs, enabling the extraction of prototypes and conditioning of the generation process on their prototype activation vector. This design enhances interpretability by showing the learned prototypes and how they influence the generation process. Additionally, the model supports downstream tasks like image manipulation, enabling more transparent and controlled modifications. Moreover, Patronus could reveal shortcut learning in the generation process by detecting unwanted correlations between learned prototypes. Notably, Patronus operates entirely without any annotations or text prompts. This work opens new avenues for understanding and controlling diffusion models through prototype-based interpretability. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/nina-weng/patronus}{https://github.com/nina-weng/patronus}.