# Reinforced Multi-teacher Knowledge Distillation for Efficient General Image Forgery Detection and Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 21 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [MVSS-Net: Multi-View Multi-Scale Supervised Networks for Image Manipulation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08935/) (2021)
- [SPAN: Spatial Pyramid Attention Network forImage Manipulation Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00726/) (2020)
- [Image Splicing Localization Using A Multi-Task Fully Convolutional Network (MFCN)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02016/) (2017)
- [Reinforced Multi-Teacher Selection for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06048/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Relation Classification from Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08013/) (2018)
- [AutoSplice: A Text-prompt Manipulated Image Dataset for Media Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06870/) (2023)
- [IML-ViT: Benchmarking Image Manipulation Localization by Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14863/) (2023)
- [D2RL: Deep Dense Architectures in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09163/) (2020)
- [Self-Adversarial Training incorporating Forgery Attention for Image Forgery Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02434/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Guard Me If You Know Me: Protecting Specific Face-Identity from Deepfakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19582/) (2025)
- [Toward Real-world Text Image Forgery Localization: Structured and Interpretable Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12658/) (2025)
- [SAPL: Semantic-Agnostic Prompt Learning in CLIP for Weakly Supervised Image Manipulation Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06222/) (2026)
- [FakeIDet3-DB: Refining Digital Attacks and Patch Extraction for Secure ID Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26641/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image forgery detection and localization (IFDL) is of vital importance as forged images can spread misinformation that poses potential threats to our daily lives. However, previous methods still struggled to effectively handle forged images processed with diverse forgery operations in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Reinforced Multi-teacher Knowledge Distillation (Re-MTKD) framework for the IFDL task, structured around an encoder-decoder ConvNeXt-UperNet along with Edge-Aware Module, named Cue-Net. First, three Cue-Net models are separately trained for the three main types of image forgeries, i.e., copy-move, splicing, and inpainting, which then serve as the multi-teacher models to train the target student model with Cue-Net through self-knowledge distillation. A Reinforced Dynamic Teacher Selection (Re-DTS) strategy is developed to dynamically assign weights to the involved teacher models, which facilitates specific knowledge transfer and enables the student model to effectively learn both the common and specific natures of diverse tampering traces. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method achieves superior performance on several recently emerged datasets comprised of various kinds of image forgeries.