The proliferation of sophisticated image editing tools and generative artificial intelligence models has made verifying the authenticity of digital images increasingly challenging, with important implications for journalism, forensic analysis, and public trust. Although numerous forensic algorithms, ranging from handcrafted methods to deep learning-based detectors, have been developed for manipulation detection, individual methods often suffer from limited robustness, fragmented evidence, or weak generalization across manipulation types and image conditions. To address these limitations, we present \textbf{FRAME}, a method for \textbf{F}orensic \textbf{R}outing and \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{M}ulti-path \textbf{E}vidence fusion for image manipulation detection. FRAME organizes diverse forensic algorithms into a multi-path analysis space, adaptively selects informative forensic paths for each input image, and fuses complementary evidence to improve detection and localization performance. By moving beyond single-method analysis and fixed fusion strategies, FRAME provides a more robust and flexible approach to image forensic reasoning while preserving interpretable forensic cues from multiple evidence sources. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FRAME across diverse manipulation scenarios. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/kzhao5/FRAME}{https://github.com/kzhao5/FRAME}.
Image forgery localization remains challenging due to diverse manipulation techniques and distribution shifts. Existing forgery localization models achieve high accuracy on benchmarks but often struggle with cross-domain generalization and robustness. In this paper, we propose SARIF (Segment Anything for Robust Image Forensics), a framework that leverages the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which has a promptable architecture and strong generalization ability. SARIF introduces a feedback-guided mask decoder and a dual-encoder design that extracts forgery-specific information to capture forensic traces while exploiting the SAM architecture. To localize manipulated regions, we design a block-wise prompting mechanism that derives forgery-specific cues from residual features between an adapted encoder and its frozen counterpart. These features are fused with the previous mask prompt to drive a feedback-based mask refinement process, enabling automatic forgery segmentation without manual input. Extensive experiments on standard forgery-localization benchmarks show that SARIF achieves strong average cross-dataset performance and robustness to common image corruptions.
Advances in generative AI have made image falsification highly realistic, demanding trustworthy authentication systems. Existing forensic detectors can target certain forgery types but lack interpretability, while vision-language models (VLMs) provide explanations but cannot exploit forensic traces for reliable detection. We propose Forensic Knowledge Graphs (FKGs), a unified framework that integrates forensic evidence extraction, structured reasoning, and human-interpretable explanation. Our FKG structure encodes forensic traces along with their causal dependencies and links to scene content. To generate accurate FKGs, we introduce a novel forensic authentication network and an Iterative Context Refinement strategy that guides VLMs to produce faithful, grounded explanations. We also present FKG-50K, a dataset of 50,000 realistic forgeries with ground-truth FKGs. Experiments demonstrate that FKG outperforms both forensic detectors and VLMs in detection, forgery identification and localization, and forensic justification.
Although some existing image manipulation localization (IML) methods incorporate authenticity-related supervision, this information is typically utilized merely as an auxiliary training signal to enhance the model's sensitivity to manipulation artifacts, rather than being explicitly modeled as localization evidence opposing the manipulated regions. Consequently, when manipulation traces are subtle or degraded by post-processing and noise, these methods struggle to explicitly compare manipulated and authentic evidence, resulting in unreliable predictions in ambiguous areas. To address these issues, we propose a courtroom-style adjudication framework that regards IML task as the confrontation of evidence followed by judgment. The framework comprises a prosecution stream, a defense stream, and a judge model. We first build a dual-hypothesis segmentation architecture on a shared multi-scale encoder, in which the prosecution stream asserts manipulation and the defense stream asserts authenticity. Guided by edge priors, it produces evidence for manipulated and authentic regions through cascaded multi-level fusion, bidirectional disagreement suppression, and dynamic debate refinement. We further develop a reinforcement learning judge model that performs strategic re-inference and refinement on uncertain regions, yielding a manipulated-region mask. The judge model is trained with advantage-based rewards and a soft-IoU objective, and reliability is calibrated via entropy and cross-hypothesis consistency. Experimental results show that our model achieves superior average performance compared with SOTA IML methods.