FACT: A Forensic Agent with Compiled Tool-Use Trajectories for AI-Generated Image Detection

arXiv:2609.05876 · cs.CV, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-05 · Read on arXiv

cs.CV, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-05

Updated: 2026-09-05

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: AI-generated image detection is increasingly open-world: new image generators produce highly realistic images that make visual artifacts harder to identify.

Terminology

Abstract

AI-generated image detection is increasingly open-world: new image generators produce highly realistic images that make visual artifacts harder to identify. Existing detectors usually rely on a fixed set of forensic cues, so a detector that works well for one generator family may fail on another. We introduce FACT (Forensic Agent with Compiled Tool-use Trajectories), which learns an image-conditioned tool-use policy for forensic analysis. Instead of applying a fixed detector, FACT decides which forensic tools to call, interprets the returned evidence, and stops when sufficient evidence has been collected. FACT follows an Evolve--Distill--Refine pipeline: it evolves an execution-verified forensic skill, compiles the skill into action--observation tool-use trajectories, distills them into a compact agent, and refines the policy with cost-aware GRPO. Across two internal and four public benchmarks, FACT achieves the best performance among all compared methods, including on recent unseen generators, deepfakes, and manipulated images.

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