FORGE: Forensic Reasoning with Grounded Evidence

Forensic deepfake analysis demands more than binary classification: investigators need region-grounded natural language explanations they can verify against the image. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are a natural fit, but pretrained MLLMs fail systematically, producing globally coherent text that misses the small localized cues defining manipulations. We argue this is an inductive bias problem rather than a capacity issue: the image-text contrastive objective training MLLM visual encoders optimizes for whole-image semantic summaries, not patch-level forensic detail. The same mismatch explains why prior deepfake reasoning methods target either face manipulation or fully AI-generated content, never both. We propose FORGE, which addresses the mismatch by routing a second visual stream into the language model from a Vision-Only Model (VOM) trained on dense patch prediction rather than image-text alignment. The MLLM's native encoder and the VOM operate on a shared patch grid, which lets us interleave their tokens with preserved spatial correspondence; we show this beats naive concatenation. A two-stage adapter training protocol (generic image-caption alignment, then joint task-specific optimization) prevents the localized stream from overfitting to training-domain manipulations. Across face-manipulated and fully synthetic content, FORGE produces region-referential explanations answering fine-grained attribute queries ("Does the eyes/nose/mouth look real or fake?") and substantially outperforms in-domain baselines on cross-domain evaluations; region-specific evaluation and human studies confirm explanation faithfulness.