DINO-FIL: Multi-Layer Transformer Fusion for Generative Inpainting Forgery Localization

Recent advancements in generative AI have led to image editing models capable of producing realistic forgeries that evade traditional image forgery localization methods, as these approaches depend on physical noise absent in synthetic data. To address this challenge, we theoretically demonstrate that the diffusion process inherently suppresses local high-frequency variance, creating a statistical energy gap that is distinguishable from the natural entropy of optical imaging. Guided by this insight, we propose FLAME, a unified framework that utilizes a LAD map to capture these intrinsic anomalies, coupled with a parameter-efficient adapter for SAM to achieve precise, pixel-level forgery localization. Furthermore, to bridge the lag between forensic benchmarks and evolving generative models, we introduce EditStream, an automated pipeline for continuous, instruction-based training data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FLAME establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming previous methods on AI-generated forgery datasets while effectively generalizing to unseen generative architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/phoenixnir/FLAME.

Modern diffusion-based inpainting models pose significant challenges for image forgery localization (IFL), as their full regeneration pipelines reconstruct the entire image via a latent decoder, disrupting the camera-level noise patterns that existing forensic methods rely on. We propose DiffusionPrint, a patch-level contrastive learning framework that learns a forensic signal robust to the spectral distortions introduced by latent decoding. It exploits the fact that inpainted regions generated by the same model share a consistent generative fingerprint, using this as a self-supervisory signal. DiffusionPrint trains a convolutional backbone via a MoCo-style objective with cross-category hard negative mining and a generator-aware classification head, producing a forensic feature map that serves as a highly discriminative secondary modality in fusion-based IFL frameworks. Integrated into TruFor, MMFusion, and a lightweight fusion baseline, DiffusionPrint consistently improves localization across multiple generative models, with gains of up to +28% on mask types unseen during fine-tuning and confirmed generalization to unseen generative architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/mever-team/diffusionprint

Diffusion-based inpainting models modify only a localized part of an image, while many AI-image detectors rely on global artifacts and do not localize. These artifacts vary across generators, limiting detector transfer under distribution shifts. Recent work shows that restoring the authentic pixels outside the inpainted region removes these cues and can degrade pretrained detectors. To address this, we present FUSED, a unified framework for the joint detection and localization of AI-generated inpainting. FUSED combines low-level forensic cues with high-level semantic features using a sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts architecture, enabling the model to adaptively prioritize the most relevant signal for each token. For each input, FUSED predicts both an image-level manipulation score and a pixel-level mask of the inpainted area. On the OpenSDID cross-generator benchmark, FUSED achieves the best average detection and localization, with the largest gains on unseen generators. The same model transfers directly to the held-out AutoSplice and CocoGlide benchmarks, more than doubling localization performance. Evaluating each held-out benchmark with and without the global generator artifact further shows that all evaluated methods, ours included, partly read the artifact as evidence of manipulation, and FUSED remains the strongest under both conditions. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/AntonNuzhdin/FUSED.