Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Jingyi Deng, Yuhui Wang, Huayu Sha, Kexin Tan, Qiyuan Peng, Yue Zhang, Junzhe Wang, Shichun Liu, Yueyuan Huang, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Zhihao Zhang, Mingqi Wu, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

The rapid advancement of generative models necessitates detection methods that generalize to synthetic images containing diverse generator and semantic artifacts. Recent research has leveraged pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, to extract forensic features that distinguish real and fake images, illustrating their promising performance in synthetic image detection. However, a systematic investigation into the embedding space of CLIP to guide its principled utilization for synthetic image detection remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by first analyzing the multi-stage CLIP image embedding space to uncover its relationship with cross-artifact forensic patterns. Our findings reveal that the mid-level stages primarily encode forensic and generator artifact features, while the high-level stages primarily encode semantic artifact features. Building upon these insights, we propose the CLIP-guided Dual-level Augmentation and Forensic Distribution Adaptation (CLIP-ADA) framework to perform artifact-invariant generalizable detection. Specifically, dual-level augmentation diversifies fake embeddings and suppresses artifact encoding during training to mitigate detectors from excessively relying on artifact features. Moreover, forensic distribution adaptation reformulates synthetic image detection as identifying distributional deviations from the CLIP encoded real embeddings and thereby designing adapters to extract cross-artifact forensic features in a detection scenario-adaptive manner. Extensive evaluations on both the conventional single-generator and continual learning-based multi-generator training settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, both suppressing the state-of-the-art methods by over 6% of average accuracy on unseen data from more than 10 generators.

Deepfake detection automatically recognizes the manipulated media by analyzing whether it contains forgeries generated through deep learning. It is natural to ask which among the existing deepfake detection approaches stand out as top performers. This question is pivotal for identifying promising research directions and offering practical guidance. Unfortunately, conducting a sound benchmark comparison of popular detection approaches based on literature results is challenging due to inconsistent evaluation conditions across studies. In this paper, our objective is to achieve a sound comparison between detection approaches by establishing a comprehensive and consistent benchmark, developing a repeatable evaluation procedure, and performing extensive performance evaluation. Accordingly, a challenging dataset consisting of the manipulated samples generated by more than 12 different methods is collected. Subsequently, we implement and evaluate 13 prominent detection approaches (comprising 11 algorithms) from existing literature, utilizing five fair-minded and practical evaluation metrics. Finally, we provide up to 882 comprehensive evaluations by training 117 detection models. The results, along with the shared data and evaluation methodology, constitute a benchmark for comparing deepfake detection approaches and measuring progress.

The emergence of advanced Deepfake technologies has gradually raised concerns in society, prompting significant attention to Deepfake detection. However, in real-world scenarios, Deepfakes often involve multiple faces. Despite this, most existing detection methods still detect these faces individually, overlooking the informative correlation between them and the relationship between the global information of the image and the local information of the faces. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing FILTER, a novel framework for multi-face forgery detection that explicitly captures underlying correlations. FILTER consists of two main modules: Multi-face Relationship Learning (MRL) and Global Feature Aggregation (GFA). Specifically, MRL learns the correlation of local facial features in multi-face images, and GFA constructs the relationship between image-level labels and individual facial features to enhance performance from a global perspective. In particular, a contrastive learning loss function is used to better discriminate between real and fake faces. Extensive experiments on two publicly available multi-face forgery datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of FILTER in multi-face forgery detection. For example, on Openforensics Test-Challenge dataset, FILTER outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods with a higher AUC score (0.980) and higher detection accuracy (92.04%).

Transition from conventional to digital pathology requires a new category of biomedical informatic infrastructure which could facilitate delicate pathological routine. Pathological diagnoses are sensitive to many external factors and is known to be subjective. Only systems that can meet strict requirements in pathology would be able to run along pathological routines and eventually digitized the area, and the developed platform should comply with existing pathological routines and international standards. Currently, there are a number of available software tools which can perform histopathological tasks including virtual slide viewing, annotating, and basic image analysis, however, none of them can serve as a digital platform for pathology. Here we describe OpenHI2, an enhanced version Open Histopathological Image platform which is capable of supporting all basic pathological tasks and file formats; ready to be deployed in medical institutions on a standard server environment or cloud computing infrastructure. In this paper, we also describe the development decisions for the platform and propose solutions to overcome technical challenges including responsive region retrieval and viewing, virtual slide magnification, recording of diagnostic areas. These factors would promote OpenHI2 be used as a platform for histopathological images in real-world clinical settings. Furthermore, in research, OpenHI2 inherited the annotation functionality from the previous version, thus acquired annotations can be directly utilized by the newly added machine learning module which include popular machine learning models to perform tasks such as histology image classification and segmentation in the same environment. Addition can be made to the platform since each component is modularized and fully documented. OpenHI2 is free, open-source, and available at https://gitlab.com/BioAI/OpenHI.