G2VD: Generalizable AI-Generated Video Detection via Counterfactual Intervention and Causal Disentanglement

AI-generated video detection benchmarks such as GenVidBench and AIGVDBench are the de facto leaderboards, yet most evaluation protocols leave uncontrolled confounds that can inflate reported generalization. As an existence proof, a three-feature clip-length classifier reaches a leave-one-generator-out (LOGO) AUC of 0.998 on GenVidBench under unaudited evaluation, while measuring nothing about motion. A 20-paper survey finds none applying all six standard controls that would catch this, so we combine them into an audited protocol and apply it to six representative feature sources (three published detectors and three repurposed signal sources), re-running it cross-dataset on AIGVDBench. The audit both debunks and certifies: the trivial classifier collapses to near chance (0.529), a CLIP baseline is caught carrying dataset identity, and the 2025 forensic detector WaveRep clears the floor at out-of-distribution LOGO AUC 0.996 with chance-level real-vs-real coherence. At a deployable FPR of 0.1%, multiple high-AUC methods fall to single-digit recall and the leaderboard order changes, so we recommend an audited tuple (AUC, above-floor margin, operating-point recall, and calibration) over a single number. As a white-box positive control, we add TemporalSpec (codec motion vectors); via cross-substrate feature fusion (XSFF), a second substrate adds genuine complementarity that survives the audit. We release VidAudit, to our knowledge the largest unified and audited detector collection for this task, providing 14 detectors behind one plugin API, a leaderboard, and Croissant metadata, available at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/vidaudit. Together, the protocol and toolkit move evaluation from leaderboard rank toward whether a result measures what it claims.

As AI video generators achieve cinematic realism, reliable detection becomes essential for safeguarding digital trust. We identify cross-scale coupling mismatch as a new forensic signal, where scale refers to the level of abstraction (semantic dynamics vs. pixel-level residuals): in natural videos, macro-level temporal dynamics and micro-level residual patterns are intrinsically coupled by the unified imaging physics pipeline, whereas AI generators, whose training objectives do not explicitly preserve this joint distribution, systematically violate this coupling. Detecting such mismatch is challenging because it requires independently extracting information at both scales while simultaneously quantifying their cross-scale relationship. We propose RIFT (Representation Inconsistency Forensics on Trajectories), an orthogonal forensic framework that addresses this through three interlocking components: a macro stream that builds a dynamic baseline of expected temporal evolution via differential geometry and persistent homology on learned manifold trajectories, a micro stream that acts as a sensitive forensic probe via steganalytic filtering and temporal modeling, and a coupling divergence module that measures the conditional dependency between the two streams. Gram-Schmidt orthogonality guarantees the information-theoretic validity of this measurement. Experiments on two benchmarks (VidProM, 120K videos, 7 generators; GenVidBench, 68K videos, 4 generators) demonstrate that RIFT achieves 99.33% and 99.72% F1-score respectively, with 97.87% unseen-generator detection rate in leave-one-out evaluation, while exhibiting encoder agnosticism: scaling from ViT-S/14 (22M) to ViT-L/14 (300M) changes F1 by less than 0.1%, and switching to a different encoder family (DINOv1) reduces F1 by only 0.73 pp. Code is available at https://github.com/Litsay/RIFT

AI-generated videos are becoming increasingly realistic, raising serious concerns about misinformation, content authenticity, and media trust. Reliable AI-generated video detection is therefore essential for multimedia forensics, yet remains challenging due to the need to capture spatial artifacts, temporal dynamics, and generalize to evolving generative models. In this paper, we explore reconstruction error as a discriminative forensic cue for AI-generated video detection. By reconstructing input videos with a pretrained WF-VAE, we observe that real and generated videos exhibit distinguishable frame-wise reconstruction error patterns, suggesting that reconstruction errors can reveal their distributional discrepancies. However, extending reconstruction-based image detection to videos is non-trivial, since video reconstruction errors are temporally organized across frames and require semantic context for effective interpretation. To address these challenges, we propose ReConFuse, a reconstruction-guided semantic fusion framework for video-level AI-generated video detection. ReConFuse extracts reconstruction error cues from WF-VAE reconstructed videos, aligns them with multi-frame semantic features, and uses a Mamba-based module to model temporal evolution for video-level classification. Experiments across multiple generators and evaluation settings demonstrate the effectiveness and strong generalization ability of ReConFuse.