The rapid progress of generative AI has enabled increasingly realistic text-centric image forgeries, posing major challenges to document safety. Existing forensic methods mainly rely on visual cues and lack evidence-based reasoning to reveal subtle text manipulations. Detection, localization, and explanation are often treated as isolated tasks, limiting reliability and interpretability. To tackle these challenges, we propose DocShield, the first unified framework formulating text-centric forgery analysis as a visual-logical co-reasoning problem. At its core, a novel Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) mechanism enables implicit agentic reasoning, iteratively cross-validating visual anomalies with textual semantics to produce consistent, evidence-grounded forensic analysis. We further introduce a Weighted Multi-Task Reward for GRPO-based optimization, aligning reasoning structure, spatial evidence, and authenticity prediction. Complementing the framework, we construct RealText-V1, a multilingual dataset of document-like text images with pixel-level manipulation masks and expert-level textual explanations. Extensive experiments show DocShield significantly outperforms existing methods, improving macro-average F1 by 41.4% over specialized frameworks and 23.4% over GPT-4o on T-IC13, with consistent gains on the challenging T-SROIE benchmark. Our dataset, model, and code will be publicly released.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Performance comparison on the RealText-V1 benchmark. DocShield (pink area) achieves state-of-the-art results across Detection (D), Grounding (G), and Explanation (E) tasks. M-F1 (macro-average F1 over the three tasks) serves as the unified evaluation metric, demonstrating DocShield’s superior and balanced multi-task capability. A radar chart comparing DocShield (pink area) against multiple MLLM baselines on RealText benchmark, showing metrics for detection, grounding, and explanation tasks, with DocShield demonstrating superior performance across all dimensions.
Figure 2. Overview of the DocShield framework. Given an input image and a prompt, the model autoregressively generates a structured, machine-readable Report . The analytical core is the Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) , a six-stage mechanism that iteratively extracts and cross-validates visual and logical anomalies. To ensure forensic faithfulness, the framework is optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using a Weighted Multi-Task Reward , strictly aligning spatial evidence, format compliance, and explanation fidelity. Diagram of the DocShield framework showing image input and prompt processed through the Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) mechanism, including stages for knowledge preparation, visual and logical cue extraction, cross-validation, grounding, and report synthesis. Weighted multi-task reward optimizes the system via GRPO. The structured report can be used for downstream forensic applications.
Figure 3. The architecture of our PR² ( P erceiver, R easoner, R eviewer) pipeline. After an initial data collection stage, our multi-agent system generates annotations through a collaborative, iterative process. The Perceiver drafts an analysis, the Reasoner structures it to target CCT & analysis report, and the Reviewer validates its quality, initiating a refinement loop if necessary. This cycle, indicated by the solid → and dashed ⇠ feedback loops, ensures the final output is a high-fidelity, structured JSON annotation. Architecture diagram of the PR² (Perceiver, Reasoner, Reviewer) data curation pipeline. The figure shows the multi-agent system workflow: data collection stage, followed by collaborative annotation generation where the Perceiver drafts analysis, the Reasoner structures it for CCT and report, and the Reviewer validates quality with iterative refinement loops indicated by solid red and dashed purple arrows, producing structured JSON annotations.
Dataset
Total
T-line
M-Lang
Det
Mask
Expl
T-IC13 ( Wang et al., 2022a )
462
✓
✗
✗
✗
✗
T-SROIE ( Wang et al., 2022b )
986
✓
✗
✗
✗
✗
OSFT ( Qu et al., 2024a )
2,938
✓
✗
✗
✗
✗
DocTamper ( Qu et al., 2023 )
170,000
✗
✗
✗
✓
✗
RealText-V1 (Ours)
5,397
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
Table 1. RealText-V1 is the first benchmark with comprehensive annotations for text-centric forgery analysis: textline-level annotations (T-line), multilingual support (M-Lang), detection (Det), grounding (Mask), and explanation (Expl).
Method
RealText
T-IC13
T-SROIE
Detection
Grounding
Explanation
M-F1
Detection
Grounding
Explanation
M-F1
Detection
Grounding
Explanation
M-F1
Acc
F1
mIOU
mF1
CSS
BS(F1)
Acc
F1
mIOU
mF1
CSS
BS(F1)
Acc
F1
mIOU
mF1
CSS
BS(F1)
Group 1: State-of-the-Art MLLM-based Frameworks
FakeShield ( Xu et al., 2026 )
58.2
55.6
30.5
12.4
66.6
53.8
40.6
36.9
32.3
23.8
26.2
57.5
52.7
37.1
14.7
25.7
0.5
1.9
51.7
52.9
26.8
TextSleuth-7B ( Qu et al., 2024b )
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
88.4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Group 2: Powerful General-Purpose MLLMs
Table 2. Comprehensive performance comparison across three benchmarks: proposed RealText, T-IC13 ( zero-shot ) and T-SROIE ( dense text for robustness ), DocShield demonstrates superior performance, strong generalization and robustness. All metrics are in percentage (%). Acc: Accuracy, mIOU: mean Intersection over Union, CSS: Cosine Similarity Score, BS(F1): BERTScore F1. M-F1: the macro-average of its Detection F1, Grounding mF1, and Explanation BS(F1). Best results are in bold , second best are underlined , ’-’: Model unreleased and result not reported.
Configuration
Detection
Grounding
Explanation
M-F1
Acc
F1
mIOU
mF1
CSS
BS(F1)
DocShield (Full)
91.4
93.2
32.4
36.7
85.0
76.9
68.9
w/o GRPO (SFT only)
89.4
90.3
27.6
31.1
81.9
73.2
64.9
w/o CCT
51.7
32.6
21.5
18.2
71.3
68.1
39.6
w/o format reward
91.2
92.6
32.1
36.0
83.8
75.4
68.0
w/o grounding reward
90.0
91.2
28.6
32.2
84.7
76.5
66.8
Table 3. Ablation study on the RealText-V1 Test set. Both the CCT mechanism and the weighted multi-task reward are shown to be critical for the performance of DocShield. All metrics are in percentage (%). Best results are in bold .
Figure 4. Qualitative comparison of artifact grounding and explanations across different methods. DocShield demonstrates superior performance, accurately identifying both visual artifacts and logical cues. Shaded regions indicate the localized tampered areas. Qualitative comparison figure showing artifact grounding and explanation results across different methods on example forged document images. DocShield results demonstrate superior performance in identifying visual artifacts and logical cues, with shaded regions indicating localized tampered areas compared to other MLLM baselines.
Distortion
FakeShield
Gemini-2.5-Pro
DocShield
Det-F1
M-F1
Det-F1
M-F1
Det-F1
M-F1
No Distortion
55.6
40.6
83.2
53.9
93.2
68.9
Blur ( K =15)
49.3 ( −6.3 )
35.5 ( −5.1 )
73.3 ( −9.9 )
47.6 ( −6.3 )
88.3 ( −4.9 )
64.2 ( −4.7 )
JPEG ( Q =20)
47.4 ( −8.2 )
32.7 ( −7.9 )
69.6 ( −13.6 )
48.8 ( −5.1 )
85.9 ( −7.3 )
61.3 ( −7.6 )
Noise ( σ =0.3)
46.2 ( −9.4 )
31.9 ( −8.7 )
61.2 ( −22.0 )
36.2 ( −17.7 )
84.7 ( −8.5 )
61.1 ( −7.8 )
Rotate ( 10∘ )
43.0 ( −12.6 )
30.3 ( −10.3 )
73.1 ( −10.1 )
47.2 ( −6.7 )
89.8 ( −3.4 )
63.4 ( −5.5 )
Table 4. Robustness Comparison under Extreme Perturbations. Det-F1 : Detection F1. M-F1 : Macro-average F1. Values in parentheses denote the performance drop relative to the No Distortion baseline. The most resilient method (smallest relative drop) for each metric is highlighted in red .
Configuration
Detection
Grounding
Explanation
M-F1
Acc
F1
mIOU
mF1
CSS
BS(F1)
DocShield (Full CCT)
91.4
93.2
32.4
36.7
85.0
76.9
68.9
FCLE (Full: Vis + Log)
60.0
56.1
11.2
21.0
73.2
67.2
48.1
FCLE (Logical Only)
43.1
46.5
5.1
9.7
-
-
-
FCLE (Visual Only)
40.6
11.8
0.9
2.1
-
-
-
w/o Visual Cues
87.3
88.7
25.3
28.1
-
-
-
Table 5. Ablation results on RealText-V1. Comparisons include DocShield (“Reason First”), the FCLE baseline (“Classify First, Explain Later”), uni-modal variants, and CCT component ablations. M-F1 is macro-average F1. Best scores are in bold ; hyphens (-) indicate metrics not applicable.
Document text forgery has evolved beyond simple pixel-level manipulation: modern attacks alter not only the appearance of a document but also its meaning, and increasingly target the OCR & LLM pipelines that consume such documents. The ACM MM 2026 GenText-Forensics challenge therefore requires systems that not only decide whether a multilingual text image is forged, but also localize the point of manipulation, identify the attack type, and produce a human-readable forensic report with supporting evidence. We present our solution, a decomposed chain-of-thought (CoT) pipeline that combines a document tampering detector (DTD) with two Qwen3-VL-32B vision-language models, each LoRA-adapted to a distinct sub-task. DTD produces tampering probability maps that are converted into numbered candidate regions; a first model (the Filterer) validates these regions and assigns a preliminary forgery type, while a second model (the Semantic Detective) merges and re-grounds the surviving regions, searches for purely semantic anomalies that are invisible to pixel-level detectors, and writes the final report. Both models are trained by distilling chain-of-thought traces from a privileged Qwen3-VL-235B teacher that has access to ground-truth masks and reports. Our approach secured third place in the ACM MM 2026 GenText-Forensics challenge. We describe the data preparation, test-time augmentation, region rendering, distillation protocol, and training configuration in detail, and report ablations over detector thresholds, prompt designs, and pipeline decompositions.
Kirill Koltsov, Aleksandr Gushchin, Dmitriy Vatolin +1
Lomonosov Moscow State University Moscow, Russia · MSU Institute for Artificial Intelligence Moscow, Russia
AI-assisted image editing threatens trust in financial, legal, and identity records. The GenText-Forensics Challenge at ACM MM 2026 addresses this by requiring structured forensic reports, in which integrating detection, pixel-level localization, and natural language explanation for multilingual text-centric forgery images. We present SEED, a modular system with three components. First, a similarity-guided pipeline augments training with diverse synthetic forgeries. Second, a single ViT, built on DINOv3 with LoRA adaptation, jointly performs detection and pixel-level localization while preserving pre-trained priors with minimal trainable parameters. Third, an evolving harness takes the detector's predictions and generates a complete forensic report via an MLLM, iteratively improved through a proposer-evaluator loop optimizing report quality. SEED ranked 3rd in the GenText-Forensics Challenge. Code and data are available at https://github.com/KahimWong/GenText-Forensics-3rd-Place.
Kahim Wong, Kemou Li, Yiming Chen +2
State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau · School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
We present AIForge-Doc, the first dedicated benchmark targeting exclusively diffusion-model-based inpainting in financial and form documents with pixel-level annotation. Existing document forgery datasets rely on traditional digital editing tools (e.g., Adobe Photoshop, GIMP), creating a critical gap: state-of-the-art detectors are blind to the rapidly growing threat of AI-forged document fraud. AIForge-Doc addresses this gap by systematically forging numeric fields in real-world receipt and form images using two AI inpainting APIs -- Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and Ideogram v2 Edit -- yielding 4,061 forged images from four public document datasets (CORD, WildReceipt, SROIE, XFUND) across nine languages, annotated with pixel-precise tampered-region masks in DocTamper-compatible format. We benchmark three representative detectors -- TruFor, DocTamper, and a zero-shot GPT-4o judge -- and find that all existing methods degrade substantially: TruFor achieves AUC=0.751 (zero-shot, out-of-distribution) vs. AUC=0.96 on NIST16; DocTamper achieves AUC=0.563 vs. AUC=0.98 in-distribution, with pixel-level IoU=0.020; GPT-4o achieves only 0.509 -- essentially at chance -- confirming that AI-forged values are indistinguishable to automated detectors and VLMs. These results demonstrate that AIForge-Doc represents a qualitatively new and unsolved challenge for document forensics.
Jiaqi Wu, Yuchen Zhou, Muduo Xu +6
Duke University · New York University · University of North Carolina +1