COMPASS: Contextual Moment Prior Alignment for Generalizable AIGI Detection

AI-generated image (AIGI) detection has become increasingly challenging due to the rapid advancement of generative models and the diminishing gap between synthetic and authentic content. Existing vision transformer-based detectors commonly rely on weighted-sum strategies to aggregate intermediate representations across transformer layers, often overlooking the inherently ordered semantic progression of hierarchical features from shallow texture cues to deep semantic representations. In this work, we propose PE-Mamba, a novel framework built upon a pre-trained PE-Core vision transformer with lightweight LoRA adaptation that introduces three complementary components for cross-layer feature aggregation and fusion. First, a bidirectional selective aggregator (BSA) processes layer-wise classification tokens through forward and backward selective scans, where the forward scan progressively accumulates shallow-to-deep forensic evidence, and the backward scan performs deep-to-shallow contextual refinement to reinterpret low-level cues in light of high-level semantic context. Second, a softmax-weighted aggregator (SWA) computes a learned global summary of all layer tokens as a complementary aggregation path. Third, a sigmoid-gated blend (SGA) adaptively fuses the BSA and SWA outputs via a learnable scalar gate, allowing the model to dynamically balance directional sequential evidence and global layer-wise aggregation. Extensive experiments on UniversalFakeDetect (96.6% mACC, 99.5% mAP) and AIGCDetect (95.3% mACC, 98.1% mAP) demonstrate that \methodname{} outperforms 18 detectors with superior generalization across diverse generative models, while training only 1.3% of total parameters (0.13% for LoRA alone).

Recent advances in AI-Generated Image (AIGI) detection have largely focused on model architectures, loss design, and training strategies, while overlooking a more fundamental factor: how supervision is structured. Existing detectors typically train on benchmark-defined data that implicitly blends semantic and artifact signals, leaving supervision design unexplored. In this paper, we examine supervision structure through controlled experiments and show that such blended supervision is not merely suboptimal but fundamentally counterproductive. Replacing it with disentangled, orthogonal supervision - paired with inductively matched models - suffices to achieve strong cross-generator generalization. We formalize this as Orthogonal Supervision Disentanglement and instantiate it in AlignGemini, a two-branch detector in which a VLM receives purely semantic supervision and a vision expert receives purely artifact supervision. With disentangled supervision coupled with inductively matched models, even the simplest training recipe achieves a significant improvement of 9.5% across five in-the-wild benchmarks - trained on images from only two generators, without complex training strategies or diverse generator coverage. We further introduce AIGI-Now, a diagnostic benchmark covering eight contemporary generators, including five closed-source commercial models, with disentangled semantic and pixel evaluation subsets for fine-grained analysis of detector capabilities. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/GzZning/Align-Don-t-Blend.

Generalization remains a critical bottleneck in AI-generated image detection. Because many modern generators are proprietary or adversarially modified, existing detectors overfit to the low-level textural patterns of accessible training data, resulting in severe failures on unseen domains. Conventional regularization techniques (e.g., $L_1$/$L_2$ norms, Dropout) apply indiscriminate parametric constraints and fail to provide the domain-invariant structure necessary for cross-generator robustness. To address this, we propose Feature-Augmented Implicit Regularization (FAIR). FAIR introduces an orthogonal, macro-structural prior, specifically, Scene Composition Structure (SCS), during training to geometrically constrain the model's optimization trajectory. By augmenting the primary feature space with domain-invariant SCS features, FAIR explicitly penalizes texture-biased shortcut learning. Crucially, this structural prior is entirely discarded at inference, yielding a smoothed, generalized decision boundary with zero architectural or computational overhead. Extensive evaluations across five massive benchmarks demonstrate that integrating FAIR into state-of-the-art detectors significantly improves cross-generator generalization, boosting accuracy by up to 8.04% and establishing new state-of-the-art robustness in zero-shot transfer scenarios.