Semantic Visual Anomaly Detection and Reasoning in AI-Generated Images

The rapid advancement of AI-generated content (AIGC) has enabled the synthesis of visually convincing images; however, many such outputs exhibit subtle semantic anomalies, including unrealistic object configurations, violations of physical laws, or commonsense inconsistencies, which compromise the overall plausibility of the generated scenes. Detecting these semantic-level anomalies is essential for assessing the trustworthiness of AIGC media, especially in AIGC image analysis, explainable deepfake detection and semantic authenticity assessment.In this paper, we formalize semantic anomaly detection and reasoning for AIGC images and introduce AnomReason, a large-scale benchmark with structured annotations as quadruples (Name, Phenomenon, Reasoning, Severity). Annotations are produced by a modular multi-agent pipeline (AnomAgent) with lightweight human-in-the-loop verification, enabling scale while preserving quality. At construction time, AnomAgent processed approximately 4.17 B GPT-4o tokens, providing scale evidence for the resulting structured annotations. We further show that models fine-tuned on AnomReason achieve consistent gains over strong vision-language baselines under our proposed semantic matching metric (SemAP and SemF1). Applications to explainable deepfake detection and semantic reasonableness assessment of image generators demonstrate practical utility. In summary, AnomReason and AnomAgent serve as a foundation for measuring and improving the semantic plausibility of AI-generated images. The code is available at https://github.com/chuangchuangtan/Semantic-Visual-Anomaly-Detection-and-Reasoning.