# XPlainVerse: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Explainable Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03562/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13458/) (2019)
- [MesoNet: a Compact Facial Video Forgery Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00888/) (2018)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [Multi-attentional Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02406/) (2021)
- [GenImage: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08571/) (2023)
- [On the Detection of Digital Face Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01717/) (2019)
- [Questioning the AI: Informing Design Practices for Explainable AI User Experiences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02478/) (2020)
- [Spatial-Phase Shallow Learning: Rethinking Face Forgery Detection in Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01856/) (2021)
- [In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20690/) (2025)
- [Human-Centered Explainable AI (XAI): From Algorithms to User Experiences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10790/) (2021)
- [M2TR: Multi-modal Multi-scale Transformers for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09770/) (2021)
- [FakeShield: Explainable Image Forgery Detection and Localization via Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02761/) (2024)
- [Human-centered Explainable AI: Towards a Reflective Sociotechnical Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01092/) (2020)
- [Towards Human-centered Explainable AI: A Survey of User Studies for Model Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11584/) (2022)
- [Context Based Emotion Recognition using EMOTIC Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13401/) (2020)
- [Spot the Fake: Large Multimodal Model-Based Synthetic Image Detection with Artifact Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14905/) (2025)
- [Common Sense Reasoning for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00126/) (2024)
- [FFAA: Multimodal Large Language Model based Explainable Open-World Face Forgery Analysis Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10072/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Attacks against Closed-Source MLLMs via Feature Optimal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21494/) (2025)
- [FakeBench: Probing Explainable Fake Image Detection via Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13306/) (2024)
- [AIGI-Holmes: Towards Explainable and Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02664/) (2025)
- [BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14632/) (2025)
- [X-Transfer Attacks: Towards Super Transferable Adversarial Attacks on CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05528/) (2025)
- [Semi-Truths: A Large-Scale Dataset of AI-Augmented Images for Evaluating Robustness of AI-Generated Image detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07472/) (2024)
- [Simplicity Level Estimate (SLE): A Learned Reference-Less Metric for Sentence Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08170/) (2023)

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

- [MSU Team at the Explainable Deepfake Detection Challenge 2026: Grounded Artifact Evidence for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09952/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As deepfake detection models increasingly produce natural language explanations, their reasoning often remains weakly grounded in visual artifacts, limiting reliability and user trust. Existing benchmarks mainly evaluate classification accuracy, overlooking whether explanations reflect the actual manipulations. This gap hinders progress toward deployable, explainable deepfake detection systems. To this end, we introduce XPlainVerse, a large-scale benchmark designed for joint deepfake detection and human-centered explanation. XPlainVerse comprises one million real and manipulated images, pairing authentic images from five established sources with forgeries generated by twelve off-the-shelf image editing and synthesis models. We further propose a multi-stage filtering pipeline, Edit-Check, to verify if manipulations satisfy their intended edits, enabling reliable reasoning supervision at scale. Beyond dataset scale, XPlainVerse provides two complementary explanation styles: technical explanations for expert analysis and simplified explanations optimized for non-technical users. To evaluate explanation quality beyond surface similarity, we propose novel metrics, EntityScore and EvidenceScore, that measure reasoning fidelity by checking whether explanations correctly identify manipulated entities and visual evidence. Human annotations on 2,000 explanation pairs validate our dataset quality against human judgment. We believe XPlainVerse will establish grounded explanation quality as a measurable dimension of deepfake detection and support scalable research on trustworthy, interpretable models.