MedForge: Interpretable Medical Deepfake Detection via Forgery-aware Reasoning

Zhihui Chen, Kai He, Qingyuan Lei, Bin Pu, Jian Zhang, Yuling Xu, Mengling Feng


Abstract
Text-guided image editors can now manipulate authentic medical scans with high fidelity, enabling lesion implantation/removal that threatens clinical trust and safety. Existing defenses are inadequate for healthcare. Medical detectors are largely black-box, while MLLM-based explainers are typically post-hoc, lack medical expertise, and may hallucinate evidence on ambiguous cases. We present MedForge, a data-and-method solution for pre-hoc, evidence-grounded medical forgery detection. We introduce MedForge-90K, a large-scale benchmark of realistic lesion edits across 19 pathologies with expert-guided reasoning supervision via doctor inspection guidelines and gold edit locations. Building on it, MedForge-Reasoner performs localize-then-analyze reasoning, predicting suspicious regions before producing a verdict, and is further aligned with Forgery-aware GSPO to strengthen grounding and reduce hallucinations. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art detection accuracy and trustworthy, expert-aligned explanations.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1177
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25672–25692
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1177/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhihui Chen, Kai He, Qingyuan Lei, Bin Pu, Jian Zhang, Yuling Xu, and Mengling Feng. 2026. MedForge: Interpretable Medical Deepfake Detection via Forgery-aware Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 25672–25692, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MedForge: Interpretable Medical Deepfake Detection via Forgery-aware Reasoning (Chen et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1177.pdf
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