$π_{0.5}$: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization

In order for robots to be useful, they must perform practically relevant tasks in the real world, outside of the lab. While vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive results for end-to-end robot control, it remains an open question how far such models can generalize in the wild. We describe $\pi_{0.5}$, a new model based on $\pi_{0}$ that uses co-training on heterogeneous tasks to enable broad generalization. $\pi_{0.5}$\ uses data from multiple robots, high-level semantic prediction, web data, and other sources to enable broadly generalizable real-world robotic manipulation. Our system uses a combination of co-training and hybrid multi-modal examples that combine image observations, language commands, object detections, semantic subtask prediction, and low-level actions. Our experiments show that this kind of knowledge transfer is essential for effective generalization, and we demonstrate for the first time that an end-to-end learning-enabled robotic system can perform long-horizon and dexterous manipulation skills, such as cleaning a kitchen or bedroom, in entirely new homes.

Fragile Watermarking for Image Certification Using Deep Steganographic Embedding

Modern identity verification systems increasingly rely on facial images embedded in biometric documents such as electronic passports. To ensure global interoperability and security, these images must comply with strict standards defined by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which specify acquisition, quality, and format requirements. However, once issued, these images may undergo unintentional degradations (e.g., compression, resizing) or malicious manipulations (e.g., morphing) and deceive facial recognition systems. In this study, we explore fragile watermarking, based on deep steganographic embedding as a proactive mechanism to certify the authenticity of ICAO-compliant facial images. By embedding a hidden image within the official photo at the time of issuance, we establish an integrity marker that becomes sensitive to any post-issuance modification. We assess how a range of image manipulations affects the recovered hidden image and show that degradation artifacts can serve as robust forensic cues. Furthermore, we propose a classification framework that analyzes the revealed content to detect and categorize the type of manipulation applied. Our experiments demonstrate high detection accuracy, including cross-method scenarios with multiple deep steganography-based models. These findings support the viability of fragile watermarking via steganographic embedding as a valuable tool for biometric document integrity verification.

AnimeDL-2M: Million-Scale AI-Generated Anime Image Detection and Localization in Diffusion Era

Recent advances in image generation, particularly diffusion models, have significantly lowered the barrier for creating sophisticated forgeries, making image manipulation detection and localization (IMDL) increasingly challenging. While prior work in IMDL has focused largely on natural images, the anime domain remains underexplored-despite its growing vulnerability to AI-generated forgeries. Misrepresentations of AI-generated images as hand-drawn artwork, copyright violations, and inappropriate content modifications pose serious threats to the anime community and industry. To address this gap, we propose AnimeDL-2M, the first large-scale benchmark for anime IMDL with comprehensive annotations. It comprises over two million images including real, partially manipulated, and fully AI-generated samples. Experiments indicate that models trained on existing IMDL datasets of natural images perform poorly when applied to anime images, highlighting a clear domain gap between anime and natural images. To better handle IMDL tasks in anime domain, we further propose AniXplore, a novel model tailored to the visual characteristics of anime imagery. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that AniXplore achieves superior performance compared to existing methods. Dataset and code can be found in https://flytweety.github.io/AnimeDL2M/.

Can GPT tell us why these images are synthesized? Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models for Forensics

The rapid development of generative AI facilitates content creation and makes image manipulation easier and more difficult to detect. While multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) have encoded rich world knowledge, they are not inherently tailored for combating AI-generated Content (AIGC) and struggle to comprehend local forgery details. In this work, we investigate the application of multimodal LLMs in forgery detection. We propose a framework capable of evaluating image authenticity, localizing tampered regions, providing evidence, and tracing generation methods based on semantic tampering clues. Our method demonstrates that the potential of LLMs in forgery analysis can be effectively unlocked through meticulous prompt engineering and the application of few-shot learning techniques. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments and show that GPT4V can achieve an accuracy of 92.1% in Autosplice and 86.3% in LaMa, which is competitive with state-of-the-art AIGC detection methods. We further discuss the limitations of multimodal LLMs in such tasks and propose potential improvements.

Big Brother is Watching: Proactive Deepfake Detection via Learnable Hidden Face

As deepfake technologies continue to advance, passive detection methods struggle to generalize with various forgery manipulations and datasets. Proactive defense techniques have been actively studied with the primary aim of preventing deepfake operation effectively working. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap between passive detection and proactive defense, and seek to solve the detection problem utilizing a proactive methodology. Inspired by several watermarking-based forensic methods, we explore a novel detection framework based on the concept of ``hiding a learnable face within a face''. Specifically, relying on a semi-fragile invertible steganography network, a secret template image is embedded into a host image imperceptibly, acting as an indicator monitoring for any malicious image forgery when being restored by the inverse steganography process. Instead of being manually specified, the secret template is optimized during training to resemble a neutral facial appearance, just like a ``big brother'' hidden in the image to be protected. By incorporating a self-blending mechanism and robustness learning strategy with a simulative transmission channel, a robust detector is built to accurately distinguish if the steganographic image is maliciously tampered or benignly processed. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over competing passive and proactive detection methods.

CDUPatch: Color-Driven Universal Adversarial Patch Attack for Dual-Modal Visible-Infrared Detectors

Adversarial patches are widely used to evaluate the robustness of object detection systems in real-world scenarios. These patches were initially designed to deceive single-modal detectors (e.g., visible or infrared) and have recently been extended to target visible-infrared dual-modal detectors. However, existing dual-modal adversarial patch attacks have limited attack effectiveness across diverse physical scenarios. To address this, we propose CDUPatch, a universal cross-modal patch attack against visible-infrared object detectors across scales, views, and scenarios. Specifically, we observe that color variations lead to different levels of thermal absorption, resulting in temperature differences in infrared imaging. Leveraging this property, we propose an RGB-to-infrared adapter that maps RGB patches to infrared patches, enabling unified optimization of cross-modal patches. By learning an optimal color distribution on the adversarial patch, we can manipulate its thermal response and generate an adversarial infrared texture. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale clipping strategy and construct a new visible-infrared dataset, MSDrone, which contains aerial vehicle images in varying scales and perspectives. These data augmentation strategies enhance the robustness of our patch in real-world conditions. Experiments on four benchmark datasets (e.g., DroneVehicle, LLVIP, VisDrone, MSDrone) show that our method outperforms existing patch attacks in the digital domain. Extensive physical tests further confirm strong transferability across scales, views, and scenarios.

FractalForensics: Proactive Deepfake Detection and Localization via Fractal Watermarks

Proactive Deepfake detection via robust watermarks has been raised ever since passive Deepfake detectors encountered challenges in identifying high-quality synthetic images. However, while demonstrating reasonable detection performance, they lack localization functionality and explainability in detection results. Additionally, the unstable robustness of watermarks can significantly affect the detection performance accordingly. In this study, we propose novel fractal watermarks for proactive Deepfake detection and localization, namely FractalForensics. Benefiting from the characteristics of fractals, we devise a parameter-driven watermark generation pipeline that derives fractal-based watermarks and conducts one-way encryption regarding the parameters selected. Subsequently, we propose a semi-fragile watermarking framework for watermark embedding and recovery, trained to be robust against benign image processing operations and fragile when facing Deepfake manipulations in a black-box setting. Meanwhile, we introduce an entry-to-patch strategy that implicitly embeds the watermark matrix entries into image patches at corresponding positions, achieving localization of Deepfake manipulations. Extensive experiments demonstrate satisfactory robustness and fragility of our approach against common image processing operations and Deepfake manipulations, outperforming state-of-the-art semi-fragile watermarking algorithms and passive detectors for Deepfake detection. Furthermore, by highlighting the areas manipulated, our method provides explainability for the proactive Deepfake detection results.

Learning Universal Features for Generalizable Image Forgery Localization

In recent years, advanced image editing and generation methods have rapidly evolved, making detecting and locating forged image content increasingly challenging. Most existing image forgery detection methods rely on identifying the edited traces left in the image. However, because the traces of different forgeries are distinct, these methods can identify familiar forgeries included in the training data but struggle to handle unseen ones. In response, we present an approach for Generalizable Image Forgery Localization (GIFL). Once trained, our model can detect both seen and unseen forgeries, providing a more practical and efficient solution to counter false information in the era of generative AI. Our method focuses on learning general features from the pristine content rather than traces of specific forgeries, which are relatively consistent across different types of forgeries and therefore can be used as universal features to locate unseen forgeries. Additionally, as existing image forgery datasets are still dominated by traditional hand-crafted forgeries, we construct a new dataset consisting of images edited by various popular deep generative image editing methods to further encourage research in detecting images manipulated by deep generative models. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the detection of unseen forgeries and also demonstrates competitive results for seen forgeries. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhaoHengrun/GIFL.

Deconfounded Reasoning for Multimodal Fake News Detection via Causal Intervention

The rapid growth of social media has led to the widespread dissemination of fake news across multiple content forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Traditional unimodal detection methods fall short in addressing complex cross-modal manipulations; as a result, multimodal fake news detection has emerged as a more effective solution. However, existing multimodal approaches, especially in the context of fake news detection on social media, often overlook the confounders hidden within complex cross-modal interactions, leading models to rely on spurious statistical correlations rather than genuine causal mechanisms. In this paper, we propose the Causal Intervention-based Multimodal Deconfounded Detection (CIMDD) framework, which systematically models three types of confounders via a unified Structural Causal Model (SCM): (1) Lexical Semantic Confounder (LSC); (2) Latent Visual Confounder (LVC); (3) Dynamic Cross-Modal Coupling Confounder (DCCC). To mitigate the influence of these confounders, we specifically design three causal modules based on backdoor adjustment, frontdoor adjustment, and cross-modal joint intervention to block spurious correlations from different perspectives and achieve causal disentanglement of representations for deconfounded reasoning. Experimental results on the FakeSV and FVC datasets demonstrate that CIMDD significantly improves detection accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 4.27% and 4.80%, respectively. Furthermore, extensive experimental results indicate that CIMDD exhibits strong generalization and robustness across diverse multimodal scenarios.

Latent Multimodal Reconstruction for Misinformation Detection

Multimodal misinformation, such as miscaptioned images, where captions misrepresent an image's origin, context, or meaning, poses a growing challenge in the digital age. To support fact-checkers, researchers have been focusing on creating datasets and developing methods for multimodal misinformation detection (MMD). Due to the scarcity of large-scale annotated MMD datasets, recent studies leverage synthetic training data via out-of-context image-caption pairs or named entity manipulations; altering names, dates, and locations. However, these approaches often produce simplistic misinformation that fails to reflect real-world complexity, limiting the robustness of detection models trained on them. Meanwhile, despite recent advancements, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain underutilized for generating diverse, realistic synthetic training data for MMD. To address this gap, we introduce "MisCaption This!", a training dataset comprising LVLM-generated miscaptioned images. Additionally, we introduce "Latent Multimodal Reconstruction" (LAMAR), a network trained to reconstruct the embeddings of truthful captions, providing a strong auxiliary signal to the detection process. To optimize LAMAR, we explore different training strategies (end-to-end training and large-scale pre-training) and integration approaches (direct, mask, gate, and attention). Extensive experiments show that models trained on "MisCaption This!" generalize better on real-world misinformation, while LAMAR sets new state-of-the-art on both NewsCLIPpings and VERITE benchmarks; highlighting the potential of LVLM-generated data and reconstruction-based approaches for advancing MMD. We release our code at: https://github.com/stevejpapad/miscaptioned-image-reconstruction