# Learning Universal Features for Generalizable Image Forgery Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07462 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07462/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Image Restoration Using Denoising Diffusion Null-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00490/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13458/) (2019)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00986/) (2023)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [Detecting and Simulating Artifacts in GAN Fake Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06515/) (2019)
- [SmartBrush: Text and Shape Guided Object Inpainting with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05034/) (2022)
- [Training behavior of deep neural network in frequency domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01251/) (2018)
- [PSCC-Net: Progressive Spatio-Channel Correlation Network for Image Manipulation Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10596/) (2021)
- [TruFor: Leveraging all-round clues for trustworthy image forgery detection and localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10957/) (2022)
- [IoU Loss for 2D/3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03851/) (2019)
- [Detecting GAN generated Fake Images using Co-occurrence Matrices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06836/) (2019)
- [MVSS-Net: Multi-View Multi-Scale Supervised Networks for Image Manipulation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08935/) (2021)
- [M2TR: Multi-modal Multi-scale Transformers for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09770/) (2021)
- [Learning JPEG Compression Artifacts for Image Manipulation Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12947/) (2021)
- [Detecting GAN-generated Imagery using Color Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08247/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DailyBench: A Unified Benchmark for AI-Generated and Manipulated Images from Modern Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24016/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, advanced image editing and generation methods have rapidly evolved, making detecting and locating forged image content increasingly challenging. Most existing image forgery detection methods rely on identifying the edited traces left in the image. However, because the traces of different forgeries are distinct, these methods can identify familiar forgeries included in the training data but struggle to handle unseen ones. In response, we present an approach for Generalizable Image Forgery Localization (GIFL). Once trained, our model can detect both seen and unseen forgeries, providing a more practical and efficient solution to counter false information in the era of generative AI. Our method focuses on learning general features from the pristine content rather than traces of specific forgeries, which are relatively consistent across different types of forgeries and therefore can be used as universal features to locate unseen forgeries. Additionally, as existing image forgery datasets are still dominated by traditional hand-crafted forgeries, we construct a new dataset consisting of images edited by various popular deep generative image editing methods to further encourage research in detecting images manipulated by deep generative models. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the detection of unseen forgeries and also demonstrates competitive results for seen forgeries. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhaoHengrun/GIFL.