Rapid advances in image generation models call for interpretable AI-generated image detection methods that not only determine authenticity but also provide supporting visual evidence. Existing approaches may produce inconsistencies between generated explanations and localized evidence regions, undermining the reliability of explanations for authenticity decisions. Meanwhile, existing benchmarks provide limited coverage of the diverse human-centric scenes prevalent in generated imagery. To address these limitations, we investigate authenticity detection with grounded and explainable visual evidence in human-centric scenes. We present HAVE (Human-centric AI-generated Visual Evidence), a diverse human-centric dataset comprising 40K real and 39K AI-generated images from 10 recent generators, with 106K localized evidence instances across 8 evidence categories, each annotated with a bounding box and a region-aligned explanation. We further propose PAVE, a Perception-Aware Visual Evidence framework that jointly performs authenticity prediction, visual evidence grounding, and region-aligned explanation generation. PAVE employs a judge-guided alignment reward to assess region--explanation consistency and evidence validity, together with perception-aware regularization that contrasts token-level predictions between original and randomly masked images to promote reliance on visual input. Experiments on HAVE and external datasets demonstrate strong performance in authenticity detection, visual evidence grounding, and explanation quality. Code and data will be released upon publication.
Detecting AI-generated images is only half the task: a deployed detector must also justify its verdict, yet existing detectors inherit three failure modes from their training data: real and fake images collected from different sources invite provenance shortcuts, supervised explanation corpora teach templated rationales, and a static forgery corpus leaves the decision boundary standing still while generators keep moving. We introduce \methodname{}, an adversarial reinforcement learning framework that pits two heterogeneous models against each other. A diffusion image editor learns to edit real photographs into fake counterparts of those same photographs that fool the current detector, while a reasoning MLLM learns to expose them with a verdict grounded in free-form reasoning. Both rewards are shortcut-proof by design: the attacker is credited only when its edit is faithfully executed, and the defender only when its verdict is correct. As the two models alternate, each round's attacker regenerates a harder training pool aimed at the current detector's blind spots, so the detector must generalize rather than memorize any fixed artifact distribution. Although the explanation is never rewarded, its quality rises round over round as a side effect of accuracy-only training. A detector trained within this loop improves monotonically across rounds on each of three external benchmarks.
The misuse of generative AI in online disinformation campaigns highlights the urgent need for transparent and explainable detection systems. In this work, we investigate how detectors for AI-generated images can be more effective in providing human-understandable explanations for their predictions. To this end, we develop a suite of detectors with various architectures and fine-tuning strategies, trained on our large-scale photorealistic fake image dataset, AIText2Image, and assess their performance on state-of-the-art text-to-image AI generators. We integrate 16 different explainable AI (XAI) methods into our detection framework, and the visual explanations are comprehensively refined and evaluated through a novel approach that prioritizes human understanding of AI-generated images, using both textual and visual responses collected from a survey of 100 participants. This framework offers insights into visual-language cues in fake image detection and into the clarity of XAI methods from a human perspective, measuring the alignment of XAI outputs with human preferences.
AI generated images are proliferating across the Internet. While some are used for entertainment, others are weaponized for fraud and social engineering attacks on social media users. Existing detectors overfit to generators seen during training, treat detection as opaque binary classification, or rely on costly Large Language Models (LLMs) to explain their outputs. In this paper, we present TruEye, a novel model for fine grained detection and localization of AI manipulated or AI generated humans and scenes. Unlike conventional detectors that assign a single authenticity label, TruEye is the first to distinguish among five compositional categories of synthetic content, including the most challenging case in which a real human is composited into a real scene where they were never physically present. At its core is a mask conditioned dual stream transformer that separates human and scene tokens while preserving patch level spatial correspondence. Specialized reasoning within each stream and region gated cross attention enforce semantic coherence between subject and background, while token level supervision and global compositional classification yield robust, interpretable predictions without invoking an LLM. By restricting intra stream attention to semantically coherent tokens, TruEye also runs over 100× faster than LLM based competitors. Experiments on 6 datasets and our newly curated FineSyn dataset, show that TruEye surpasses state of the art detectors with higher accuracy, faster inference, and stronger generalization to unseen AI generated or manipulated images.