ManipShield: A Unified Framework for Image Manipulation Detection, Localization and Explanation
This addresses the challenge of detecting diverse AI-edited images for security and verification applications, though it appears incremental as it builds upon existing multimodal large language models.
The authors tackled the problem of detecting AI-edited image manipulations by introducing ManipBench, a large-scale benchmark with over 450K manipulated images from 25 models, and ManipShield, a unified model that achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generality to unseen manipulation models.
With the rapid advancement of generative models, powerful image editing methods now enable diverse and highly realistic image manipulations that far surpass traditional deepfake techniques, posing new challenges for manipulation detection. Existing image manipulation detection and localization (IMDL) benchmarks suffer from limited content diversity, narrow generative-model coverage, and insufficient interpretability, which hinders the generalization and explanation capabilities of current manipulation detection methods. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{ManipBench}, a large-scale benchmark for image manipulation detection and localization focusing on AI-edited images. ManipBench contains over 450K manipulated images produced by 25 state-of-the-art image editing models across 12 manipulation categories, among which 100K images are further annotated with bounding boxes, judgment cues, and textual explanations to support interpretable detection. Building upon ManipBench, we propose \textbf{ManipShield}, an all-in-one model based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that leverages contrastive LoRA fine-tuning and task-specific decoders to achieve unified image manipulation detection, localization, and explanation. Extensive experiments on ManipBench and several public datasets demonstrate that ManipShield achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong generality to unseen manipulation models. Both ManipBench and ManipShield will be released upon publication.