# Multi-Tool Image Editing Attribution in Facial Forgery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02751 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02751/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [Forgery-aware Adaptive Transformer for Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16649/) (2023)
- [EditGAN: High-Precision Semantic Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03186/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Diffusion for Multi-Modal Face Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10530/) (2023)
- [MMFakeBench: A Mixed-Source Multimodal Misinformation Detection Benchmark for LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08772/) (2024)
- [GPT-ImgEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Diagnosing GPT4o in Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02782/) (2025)
- [Detecting Photoshopped Faces by Scripting Photoshop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05856/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Up-Sampling Operations in CNN-based Generative Network for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10461/) (2023)
- [RepMix: Representation Mixing for Robust Attribution of Synthesized Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02063/) (2022)
- [Progressive Open Space Expansion for Open-Set Model Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06877/) (2023)
- [Exposing GAN-synthesized Faces Using Landmark Locations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00167/) (2019)
- [AMMeBa: A Large-Scale Survey and Dataset of Media-Based Misinformation In-The-Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11697/) (2024)
- [Image Provenance Analysis at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06510/) (2018)
- [Content-Style Decoupling for Unsupervised Makeup Transfer without Generating Pseudo Ground Truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17240/) (2024)
- [DiffusionAct: Controllable Diffusion Autoencoder for One-shot Face Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17217/) (2024)
- [Unconstrained Facial Expression Transfer using Style-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06253/) (2019)
- [Model Synthesis for Zero-Shot Model Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15977/) (2023)
- [Towards Consistent and Controllable Image Synthesis for Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02465/) (2025)
- [FakeChain: Exposing Shallow Cues in Multi-Step Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16602/) (2025)
- [Fighting Malicious Media Data: A Survey on Tampering Detection and Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05667/) (2022)
- [Modelship Attribution: Tracing Multi-Stage Manipulations Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02405/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As generative AI tools become increasingly powerful and easy to use, people can easily edit portrait images with a prompt, necessitating the task of image editing attribution, which predicts the involved editing tools from the given image. Existing attribution methods hold the single-tool assumption and can only attribute a specific editing tool, but struggle to handle the more complex and increasingly common multi-tool editing scenarios, where artifacts left by different editing tools are composite and overlapped. To address this gap, we explore Multi-Tool Image Editing Attribution (MIEA), which aims to identify multiple editing tools involved in a multi-tool edited facial image. To simulate the real-life editing operations on facial images, we then construct a new dataset, MultiEdit, which contains 500k+ edited facial images and covers six types of editing tools that support face swapping (Deepfake) and various facial enhancements. Inspired by the findings from data analysis, we design DPEC, a multi-tool attribution method that can capture distinguishable, locality-aware editing tool traces from both spatial and frequency domains with the support of an error-based curriculum learning strategy. Experiments show Method outperforms nine methods for facial images edited in at most five steps.