FaceShield: Explainable Face Anti-Spoofing with Multimodal Large Language Models

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Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, xiaochun cao, Jun Feng, Yuhao Gao, Xun Lin, Yichen Shi, Zhuofu Tao, Hongyang Wang, Zitong Yu, Xiaochen Yuan, Liepiao Zhang
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Abstract

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) is crucial for protecting facial recognition systems from presentation attacks. Previous methods approached this task as a classification problem, lacking interpretability and reasoning behind the predicted results. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and decision-making in visual tasks. However, there are currently no MLLMs for FAS and existing FAS datasets only contain simple classification labels without corresponding explanations. To address this gap, we propose FaceShield, a MLLM for FAS, along with the corresponding pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets, FaceShield-pre10K and FaceShield-sft45K. FaceShield is capable of determining the authenticity of faces, identifying types of spoofing attacks, providing reasoning for its judgments, and detecting attack areas. Specifically, we employ spoof-aware vision perception (SAVP) that incorporates both the original image and auxiliary information based on prior knowledge. We then use an prompt-guided vision token masking (PVTM) strategy to random mask vision tokens, thereby improving the model's generalization ability. We conducted extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, demonstrating that FaceShield significantly outperforms previous deep learning models and general MLLMs on four FAS tasks, i.e., coarse-grained classification, fine-grained classification, reasoning, and attack localization . Our instruction datasets, protocols, and codes will be released soon.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Biometric Identification and Security Face recognition and analysis Digital Media Forensic Detection

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN