WebP, as an image format increasingly adopted across the internet, is becoming an important cover for steganography, yet its steganographic capacity remains largely unexplored. The distinctive structure of lossy WebP compression, particularly its predictive coding and uniform quantization, poses significant challenges to conventional embedding cost modeling. These include nonlinear relationship between Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients and reconstruction pixels, quantization uniformity obscuring frequency sensitivity, and distortion propagation across blocks. To address these challenges, we propose WebP-Adaptive Residual-reconstruction-united and Predictive-aware steganography (WARP), a novel embedding framework specifically designed for WebP images. WARP introduces a unified cost modeling paradigm that integrates reconstruction-domain texture complexity, residual-frequency quantization behavior, and predictive coding order. Specifically, it precisely identifies secure embedding regions by calculating reconstruction-domain texture-adaptive costs and then refining them with residual-domain frequency sensitivity. Furthermore, to mitigate inter-block distortion propagation inherent in predictive coding, WARP incorporates a novel predictive-order-aware cost decay mechanism that adjusts embedding costs based on block coordinates. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first comprehensive study on secure adaptive WebP steganography. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WARP achieves superior security performance against state-of-the-art steganalysis while maintaining high visual quality.

The proliferation of deepfake faces poses huge potential negative impacts on our daily lives. Despite substantial advancements in deepfake detection over these years, the generalizability of existing methods against forgeries from unseen datasets or created by emerging generative models remains constrained. In this paper, inspired by the zero-shot advantages of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we propose a novel approach that repurposes a well-trained VLM for general deepfake detection. Motivated by the model reprogramming paradigm that manipulates the model prediction via input perturbations, our method can reprogram a pre-trained VLM model (e.g., CLIP) solely based on manipulating its input without tuning the inner parameters. First, learnable visual perturbations are used to refine feature extraction for deepfake detection. Then, we exploit information of face embedding to create sample-level adaptative text prompts, improving the performance. Extensive experiments on several popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that (1) the cross dataset and cross-manipulation performances of deepfake detection can be significantly and consistently improved (e.g., over 88% AUC in cross-dataset setting from FF++ to Wild-Deepfake); (2) the superior performances are achieved with fewer trainable parameters, making it a promising approach for real-world applications.

Document Image Tampering Localization (DITL) advances considerably, yet achieving robust cross-dataset generalization remains a formidable challenge for practical applications. Expanding existing document datasets for training is labor-intensive, making it appealing to incorporate data from non-document domains such as natural scene images. However, domain-specific variations, including differences in color distribution and texture, compromise the performance of joint training. To address this issue, we propose DITL2, a Dual-stage Invariance Transfer Learning framework for Document Image Tampering Localization that consists of Cross-Domain Invariance Pre-training (CDIP) and Frequency Decoupling Parameter Adaptation (FDPA). In the pre-training stage, CDIP employs style transfer and texture consistency learning to suppress domain-specific influences from tampered natural scene images, and tampering trace commonality learning to acquire domain-invariant features. In the fine-tuning stage, FDPA adapts the parameters of the pre-trained model, leveraging the general knowledge from the pre-trained model to address DITL tasks while reducing the risk of overfitting. Experiments show that this approach effectively leverages external data resources to boost model performance, achieving state-of-the-art results across a variety of cross-dataset settings.

Securing personal identity against deepfake attacks is increasingly critical in the digital age, especially for celebrities and political figures whose faces are easily accessible and frequently targeted. Most existing deepfake detection methods focus on general-purpose scenarios and often ignore the valuable prior knowledge of known facial identities, e.g., "VIP individuals" whose authentic facial data are already available. In this paper, we propose **VIPGuard**, a unified multimodal framework designed to capture fine-grained and comprehensive facial representations of a given identity, compare them against potentially fake or similar-looking faces, and reason over these comparisons to make accurate and explainable predictions. Specifically, our framework consists of three main stages. First, we fine-tune a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to learn detailed and structural facial attributes. Second, we perform identity-level discriminative learning to enable the model to distinguish subtle differences between highly similar faces, including real and fake variations. Finally, we introduce user-specific customization, where we model the unique characteristics of the target face identity and perform semantic reasoning via MLLM to enable personalized and explainable deepfake detection. Our framework shows clear advantages over previous detection works, where traditional detectors mainly rely on low-level visual cues and provide no human-understandable explanations, while other MLLM-based models often lack a detailed understanding of specific face identities. To facilitate the evaluation of our method, we build a comprehensive identity-aware benchmark called **VIPBench** for personalized deepfake detection, involving the latest 7 face-swapping and 7 entire face synthesis techniques for generation. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms existing methods in both detection and explanation. The code is available at https://github.com/KQL11/VIPGuard .

Current AIGC detectors often achieve near-perfect accuracy on images produced by the same generator used for training but struggle to generalize to outputs from unseen generators. We trace this failure in part to latent prior bias: detectors learn shortcuts tied to patterns stemming from the initial noise vector rather than learning robust generative artifacts. To address this, we propose \textbf{On-Manifold Adversarial Training (OMAT)}: by optimizing the initial latent noise of diffusion models under fixed conditioning, we generate \emph{on-manifold} adversarial examples that remain on the generator’s output manifold—unlike pixel-space attacks, which introduce off-manifold perturbations that the generator itself cannot reproduce and that can obscure the true discriminative artifacts. To test against state-of-the-art generative models, we introduce GenImage++, a test-only benchmark of outputs from advanced generators (Flux.1, SD3) with extended prompts and diverse styles. We apply our adversarial-training paradigm to ResNet50 and CLIP baselines and evaluate across existing AIGC forensic benchmarks and recent challenge datasets. Extensive experiments show that adversarially trained detectors significantly improve cross-generator performance without any network redesign. Our findings on latent-prior bias offer valuable insights for future dataset construction and detector evaluation, guiding the development of more robust and generalizable AIGC forensic methodologies.

The effectiveness of deep learning-based steganalyzers is significantly compromised by adversarial steganography. In response to this challenge, recent efforts have been devoted to identifying distinct traces of adversarial perturbations, yet they have overlooked the inherently adversarial robustness required in steganalyzers. This paper aims to develop a steganalytic model that defends against adversarial steganography by increasing the difficulty of generating adversarial stego images. To achieve this objective, the techniques of learning neighboring feature relationships and self-adversarial adjustment are proposed with three essential modules. The first one, named K-times Dropout Neighboring Feature Transformer (KDNFT), is designed to accept a set of neighboring features obtained by dropout as input. Based on the finding that K-times dropout neighboring features have different distributions for covers and adversarial stegos, KDNFT effectively learns to exploit the relationships among these features for adversarial steganalysis. To facilitate adversarial training, which is an effective way to improve intrinsic robustness, the second module called Pseudo Adversarial Stego Generator (PASG) is proposed to synthesize samples for training. The third module is a Test-time Active Perturbation (TAP) module that adjusts the results of adversarial stego samples close to the decision boundary in a self-adversarial way. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves improvements in steganalyzing various kinds of adversarial steganographic methods.

Abstract VM consolidation has been proposed as an effective solution to improve resource utilization and energy efficiency through VM migration. Improper VM placement during consolidation may cause frequent VM migrations and constant on–off switching of PMs, which can significantly hurt QoS and increase energy consumption. Most existing algorithms on efficient VM placement suffer the problem of easily falling into a sub-optimum prematurely since they are heuristic. Also, they do not achieve a good balance between multiple different goals, such as resource utilization, QoS, and energy efficiency. To address this problem, we propose an effective and efficient VM placement approach called MOEA/D-based VM placement, with the goal of optimizing energy efficiency and resource utilization. We develop an improved MOEA/D algorithm to search for a Pareto-compromise solution for VM placement. Our experiment results demonstrate that the proposed multi-objective optimization (MOO) model and VM placement solution have immense potential as it offers significant cost savings and a significant improvement in energy efficiency and resource utilization under dynamic workload scenarios.