# NeXT-IMDL: Build Benchmark for NeXT-Generation Image Manipulation Detection & Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23374 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23374/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 77 of its 115 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors that Generalize Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10174/) (2023)
- [Paint by Example: Exemplar-based Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13227/) (2022)
- [Blended Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02779/) (2022)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [GenImage: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08571/) (2023)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15738/) (2024)
- [Inpaint Anything: Segment Anything Meets Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06790/) (2023)
- [MAT: Mask-Aware Transformer for Large Hole Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15270/) (2022)
- [FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08629/) (2024)
- [WildDeepfake: A Challenging Real-World Dataset for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01456/) (2021)
- [Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04746/) (2024)

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

- [Veritas++: Value-aware On-Policy Distillation for Perception-Enhanced AIGI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27113/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The accessibility surge and abuse risks of user-friendly image editing models have created an urgent need for generalizable, up-to-date methods for Image Manipulation Detection and Localization (IMDL). Current IMDL research typically uses cross-dataset evaluation, where models trained on one benchmark are tested on others. However, this simplified evaluation approach conceals the fragility of existing methods when handling diverse AI-generated content, leading to misleading impressions of progress. This paper challenges this illusion by proposing NeXT-IMDL, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark designed not just to collect data, but to probe the generalization boundaries of current detectors systematically. Specifically, NeXT-IMDL categorizes AIGC-based manipulations along four fundamental axes: editing models, manipulation types, content semantics, and forgery granularity. Built upon this, NeXT-IMDL implements five rigorous cross-dimension evaluation protocols. Our extensive experiments on 11 representative models reveal a critical insight: while these models perform well in their original settings, they exhibit systemic failures and significant performance degradation when evaluated under our designed protocols that simulate real-world, various generalization scenarios. By providing this diagnostic toolkit and the new findings, we aim to advance the development towards building truly robust, next-generation IMDL models.