# Detecting Localized Deepfakes: How Well Do Synthetic Image Detectors Handle Inpainting?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16688 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16688/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [On the detection of synthetic images generated by diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00680/) (2022)
- [Global Texture Enhancement for Fake Face Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00133/) (2020)
- [BrushNet: A Plug-and-Play Image Inpainting Model with Decomposed Dual-Branch Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06976/) (2024)
- [Forgery-aware Adaptive Transformer for Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16649/) (2023)
- [A Task is Worth One Word: Learning with Task Prompts for High-Quality Versatile Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03594/) (2023)
- [EdgeConnect: Generative Image Inpainting with Adversarial Edge Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00212/) (2019)
- [PatchCraft: Exploring Texture Patch for Efficient AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12397/) (2023)
- [Noiseprint: a CNN-based camera model fingerprint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08396/) (2018)
- [Leveraging Representations from Intermediate Encoder-blocks for Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19091/) (2024)
- [Fusing Global and Local Features for Generalized AI-Synthesized Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13964/) (2022)
- [Shift-Net: Image Inpainting via Deep Feature Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09392/) (2018)
- [Region Normalization for Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10375/) (2019)
- [Frequency-Aware Deepfake Detection: Improving Generalizability through Frequency Space Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07240/) (2024)
- [TGIF: Text-Guided Inpainting Forgery Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11566/) (2024)
- [Zooming In on Fakes: A Novel Dataset for Localized AI-Generated Image Detection with Forgery Amplification Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11922/) (2025)
- [AI-GenBench: A New Ongoing Benchmark for AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20865/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Conceptual Understanding in Multimodal Contrastive Learning through Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02875/) (2024)
- [Generalized Design Choices for Deepfake Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21507/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid progress of generative AI has enabled highly realistic image manipulations, including inpainting and region-level editing. These approaches preserve most of the original visual context and are increasingly exploited in cybersecurity-relevant threat scenarios. While numerous detectors have been proposed for identifying fully synthetic images, their ability to generalize to localized manipulations remains insufficiently characterized. This work presents a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art detectors, originally trained for the deepfake detection on fully synthetic images, when applied to a distinct challenge: localized inpainting detection. The study leverages multiple datasets spanning diverse generators, mask sizes, and inpainting techniques. Our experiments show that models trained on a large set of generators exhibit partial transferability to inpainting-based edits and can reliably detect medium- and large-area manipulations or regeneration-style inpainting, outperforming many existing ad hoc detection approaches.