5arXiv cs.AI (Artificial Intelligence)·
Domain-generalized framework for pixel-level image tampering detection in VLM-generated content
Researchers propose a training framework for detecting pixel-level image tampering in content generated by modern vision-language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Qwen-Image. The approach combines balanced minibatch sampling and a late-injection strategy to improve out-of-distribution robustness without overfitting to limited new-domain data. The framework outperforms the prior state-of-the-art PIXAR method by 26.1% and 26.8% relative improvement in gIoU and cIoU respectively, evaluated on OOD VLMs including GPT-Images-2.0, Gemini-3.1, FLUX.2, and Seedream 4.5. The work is directly motivated by the growing difficulty of detecting AI-generated image manipulations as generation quality improves.
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Multi-domain benchmark for detecting AI-generated text-rich images from GPT-Image-2
Researchers introduce a new benchmark of 8,602 images across six categories (commercial posters, infographics, academic posters, receipts, tables, UI screenshots) specifically for detecting AI-generated text-rich images produced by OpenAI's GPT-Image-2. Five zero-shot detectors are evaluated, revealing highly domain-dependent performance and severe sensitivity to JPEG compression even in the strongest conventional detector. A multimodal VLM is also explored as a detector, showing promise but limitations on structured formats. The work highlights a gap in existing benchmarks that focus on object-centric rather than text-layout-centric images.
PGT: Procedurally Generated Tasks for Improving Visual Grounding in MLLMs
This paper introduces Procedurally Generated Tasks (PGT), a data-driven framework that overlays geometric primitives on images to create dense supervision signals for fine-grained visual grounding in multimodal large language models. PGT serves both as a training augmentation method and a diagnostic tool to isolate perception failures from semantic priors. Instruction tuning on LLaVA-v1.5-Instruct augmented with PGT data yields gains of up to +20% on the What'sUp benchmark and +13.3% on CV-Bench-2D. The results suggest that spatial reasoning deficits in MLLMs stem primarily from inadequate supervision rather than architectural or resolution constraints.
Training-free mechanistic defense against typographic attacks on CLIP-based vision encoders
Researchers propose a training-free method to defend CLIP-based vision encoders against typographic attacks, where irrelevant text embedded in images biases visual representations toward lexical rather than semantic meaning. The approach uses sampling-based mechanistic interpretability to identify specific Vision Transformer attention heads responsible for encoding lexical information, then applies targeted circuit-level interventions to suppress this behavior. Without any retraining, the method outperforms both supervised and training-free baselines on object classification and improves Visual Question Answering accuracy under typographic attack conditions on RIO-Bench across several state-of-the-art LVLMs.
Social Gaze Consistency as a Semantic Cue for AI-Generated Image Detection
This paper introduces Social Gaze Consistency (SGC), a high-level semantic detection axis based on the mutual coherence of gaze direction, head-eye alignment, and pupil placement between interacting individuals in images. The authors construct a controlled diagnostic dataset with region-specific gaze perturbations and a Block-Compositional Caption Supervision scheme to train detectors without generator-fingerprint memorization shortcuts. Cross-architecture validation shows +3.7 pp improvement on the COCOAI Interaction subset when applied to FakeVLM, with gains transferring from a single inpainter (FLUX.1-Fill) to multi-generator suites. The work argues that diffusion models share a spectral weakness in periocular structure, making gaze coherence a robust, backbone-agnostic detection signal orthogonal to existing low-level artifact methods.
Gazer: Training-free semantic correction for autoregressive visual models using MLLM feedback
Researchers introduce Gazer, a training-free framework that integrates multimodal large language model feedback into the sampling loop of autoregressive visual models (AVMs) to correct semantic errors during generation. The system operates in two stages: Reflective Diagnosis identifies semantic errors in intermediate generation states, and Semantic Correction rewinds and adjusts the generation trajectory to better match the target prompt. Experiments on compositional image and video benchmarks show improved semantic alignment and compositional accuracy across multiple AVMs without additional training. The work addresses a known weakness of next-scale prediction AVMs, where semantic errors accumulate across discrete generation scales.
Meta Research Improves Image Generation via Staged Planning and Self-Revision Fine-Tuning
Researchers from Meta and collaborating universities propose a fine-tuning method that teaches image generators to compose images through discrete plan-sketch-inspect-refine cycles rather than generating all at once. Starting from BAGEL-7B, they construct ~62,000 training examples using GPT-4o and FLUX.1 Kontext to supervise each stage, achieving 83% on GenEval versus 77% for the base model and a competing method (PARM) that required 11x more training data and ~8x more inference steps. The approach improves spatial relationship accuracy, object attribute fidelity, and real-world knowledge grounding in generated images.
AirflowAttack: First adversarial attack on infrared remote-sensing VLMs using thermal-airflow perturbations
Researchers introduce AirflowAttack, the first adversarial attack targeting vision-language models deployed on infrared remote-sensing imagery, using physically plausible thermal-airflow turbulence as the perturbation prior. A single input-agnostic perturbation optimized on one surrogate CLIP model achieves 48.5% mean zero-shot attack success rate across five CLIP backbones, outperforming four IR-specific physical baselines. Applied to six state-of-the-art VLMs, the attack reduces scene-classification accuracy by up to 38.2% relative while paradoxically increasing model confidence, causing confabulation of thermal artifacts as genuine evidence. The work also releases a benchmark spanning eleven models and four tasks, exposing systematic vulnerabilities in security-critical IR VLM deployments.
Vision-OPD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Fine-Grained Visual Understanding in MLLMs
Vision-OPD addresses a 'regional-to-global perception gap' in multimodal LLMs, where models answer fine-grained visual questions more accurately when given cropped evidence regions than full images. The method instantiates a crop-conditioned teacher and full-image-conditioned student from the same MLLM, minimizing token-level divergence along on-policy rollouts to transfer regional perception to the full-image policy. This self-distillation requires no external teacher models, ground-truth labels, reward verifiers, or inference-time tools. Benchmarks show competitive or superior performance against larger open-source, closed-source, and agentic 'Thinking-with-Images' models.