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

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.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.05876 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.05876v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.05876 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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