LEGION: Learning to Ground and Explain for Synthetic Image Detection
Hengrui Kang, Siwei Wen, Zichen Wen, Junyan Ye, Weijia Li, Peilin Feng, Baichuan Zhou, Bin Wang, Dahua Lin, Linfeng Zhang, Conghui He
2025-03-20
Summary
This paper is about creating a tool to detect fake images created by AI and explain how it knows they're fake.
What's the problem?
It's getting harder to tell real images from fake ones, and current tools don't always explain why an image is considered fake.
What's the solution?
The researchers created a system called LEGION that can identify fake images, highlight the areas that look fake, and explain why those areas are suspicious.
Why it matters?
This work matters because it helps combat the spread of misinformation and can improve the quality of AI-generated images.
Abstract
The rapid advancements in generative technology have emerged as a double-edged sword. While offering powerful tools that enhance convenience, they also pose significant social concerns. As defenders, current synthetic image detection methods often lack artifact-level textual interpretability and are overly focused on image manipulation detection, and current datasets usually suffer from outdated generators and a lack of fine-grained annotations. In this paper, we introduce SynthScars, a high-quality and diverse dataset consisting of 12,236 fully synthetic images with human-expert annotations. It features 4 distinct image content types, 3 categories of artifacts, and fine-grained annotations covering pixel-level segmentation, detailed textual explanations, and artifact category labels. Furthermore, we propose LEGION (LEarning to Ground and explain for Synthetic Image detectiON), a multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based image forgery analysis framework that integrates artifact detection, segmentation, and explanation. Building upon this capability, we further explore LEGION as a controller, integrating it into image refinement pipelines to guide the generation of higher-quality and more realistic images. Extensive experiments show that LEGION outperforms existing methods across multiple benchmarks, particularly surpassing the second-best traditional expert on SynthScars by 3.31% in mIoU and 7.75% in F1 score. Moreover, the refined images generated under its guidance exhibit stronger alignment with human preferences. The code, model, and dataset will be released.