AI-Generated Image Detection

With the rapid evolution of synthetic media, Image Manipulation Localization (IML) has emerged as a critical component in multimedia forensics for ensuring the integrity of digital content. However, generalization remains a core challenge, as existing discriminative methods typically learn a fixed decision boundary that tends to overfit to specific training artifacts and fails to adapt to unseen manipulation types. To address this, we propose DiffIML, a novel framework that introduces score-based generative modeling to IML. Diverging from the direct estimation of hard boundaries, DiffIML approximates the score function, the gradient of the log-likelihood, to capture the intrinsic geometric topology of mask distributions. This paradigm leverages structural priors to iteratively recover coherent masks from noise, thereby circumventing the brittleness associated with discriminative models. Under this formulation, diffusion models serve as an effective numerical solver for the learned score function.To ensure practicality, we respectively resolve the efficiency and stability bottlenecks of standard diffusion by: (1) utilizing a Lightweight Mask-Specific VAE for fast latent-space process and a decoupled architecture with a lightweight denoising UNet, (2) edge supervision and error prior to mitigate error accumulation during sampling. Extensive experiments of two distinct protocols on eight non-generative and three generative benchmarks demonstrate that DiffIML consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding remarkable generalization improvements on diverse unseen datasets. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/scu-zjz/DiffIML.

Diffusion-based image synthesis has made AI-generated images (AIGI) increasingly photorealistic, raising urgent concerns about authenticity in applications such as misinformation detection, digital forensics, and content moderation. Despite the substantial advances in AIGI detection, how to correct detected AI-generated images with visible artifacts and restore realistic appearance remains largely underexplored. Moreover, few existing work has established the connection between AIGI detection and artifact correction. To fill this gap, we propose GenShield, a unified autoregressive framework that jointly performs explainable AIGI detection and controllable artifact correction in a closed loop from diagnosis to restoration, revealing a mutually reinforcing relationship between these two tasks. We further introduce a Visual Chain-of-Thought based curriculum learning strategy that enables self-explained, multi-step diagnose-then-repair'' correction with an explicit stopping criterion. A high-quality dataset with large-scale artifact-restored'' pairs is also constructed alongside a unified evaluation pipeline. Extensive experiments on our correction benchmark and mainstream AIGI detection benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/zhipeixu/GenShield.

The rise of AI-generated images (AIGIs) poses growing challenges for digital authenticity, prompting the need for efficient, generalizable image forgery detection systems. Existing methods, whether non-LLM-based or LLM-based, exhibit distinct advantages and limitations. While non-LLM-based models offer efficient low-level artifact detection, they often lack semantic understanding. Conversely, LLM-based methods provide strong semantic reasoning and explainability but are computationally intensive and less sensitive to subtle visual artifacts. Moreover, the true contribution of explanatory reasoning texts to forgery detection performance remains unclear. In this work, we investigate the intrinsic value and potential of LLM-generated reasoning texts, considering it a source of generalization and semantic-error sensitivity. Based on these findings, we propose ReAlign, a novel framework that distills high-quality reasoning texts generated by a GRPO-optimized LLM into a lightweight AIGI detector via contrastive learning. ReAlign effectively inherits the generalization ability and semantic sensitivity capability of reasoning textual representations, while remaining efficient and lightweight for deployment. Moreover, ReAlign adopts a tailored joint optimization strategy that integrates contrastive loss for image-text alignment and classification loss for accurate forgery discrimination. Experimental results on AIGCDetectBenchmark, AIGI-Holmes, and our newly constructed UltraSynth-10k demonstrate that ReAlign consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art detectors in both accuracy and generalization, particularly when facing complex, high-fidelity forgeries from modern generative models.

In recent years, computer vision has witnessed remarkable progress, fueled by the development of innovative architectures such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion-based architectures, Vision Transformers (ViTs), and, more recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs). This progress has undeniably contributed to creating increasingly realistic and diverse visual content. However, such advancements in image generation also raise concerns about potential misuse in areas such as misinformation, identity theft, and threats to privacy and security. In parallel, Mamba-based architectures have emerged as versatile tools for a range of image analysis tasks, including classification, segmentation, medical imaging, object detection, and image restoration, in this rapidly evolving field. However, their potential for identifying AI-generated images remains relatively unexplored compared to established techniques. This study provides a systematic evaluation and comparative analysis of Vision Mamba models for AI-generated image detection. We benchmark multiple Vision Mamba variants against representative CNNs, ViTs, and VLM-based detectors across diverse datasets and synthetic image sources, focusing on key metrics such as accuracy, efficiency, and generalizability across diverse image types and generative models. Through this comprehensive analysis, we aim to elucidate Vision Mamba's strengths and limitations relative to established methodologies in terms of applicability, accuracy, and efficiency in detecting AI-generated images. Overall, our findings highlight both the promise and current limitations of Vision Mamba as a component in systems designed to distinguish authentic from AI-generated visual content. This research is crucial for enhancing detection in an age where distinguishing between real and AI-generated content is a major challenge.

As the misuse of AI-generated images grows, generalizable image detection techniques are urgently needed. Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods adopt aligned training datasets to reduce content, size, and format biases, empowering models to capture robust forgery cues. A common strategy is to employ reconstruction techniques, e.g., VAE and DDIM, which show remarkable results in diffusion-based methods. However, such reconstruction-based approaches typically introduce limited and homogeneous artifacts, which cannot fully capture diverse generative patterns, such as GAN-based methods. To complement reconstruction-based fake images with aligned yet diverse artifact patterns, we propose a GAN-based upsampling approach that mimics GAN-generated fake patterns while preserving content, size, and format alignment. This naturally results in two aligned but distinct types of fake images. However, due to the domain shift between reconstruction-based and upsampling-based fake images, direct mixed training causes suboptimal results, where one domain disrupts feature learning of the other. Accordingly, we propose a Separate Expert Fusion (SEF) framework to extract complementary artifact information and reduce inter-domain interference. We first train domain-specific experts via LoRA adaptation on a frozen foundational model, then conduct decoupled fusion with a gating network to adaptively combine expert features while retaining their specialized knowledge. Rather than merely benefiting GAN-generated image detection, this design introduces diverse and complementary artifact patterns that enable SEF to learn a more robust decision boundary and improve generalization across broader generative methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields strong results across 13 diverse benchmarks. Codes are released at: https://github.com/liyih/SEF_AIGC_detection.

In recent years, the rapid evolution of generative AI has fundamentally reshaped the paradigm of image forgery, breaking the traditional boundaries between document editing, natural image manipulation, DeepFake generation, and full-image AIGC synthesis. Despite this shift toward unified forgery generation, existing research in Fake Image Detection and Localization (FIDL) remains fragmented. This creates a mismatch between increasingly unified forgery generation mechanisms and the domain-specific detection paradigm. Bridging this mismatch poses two key challenges for FIDL: understanding cross-domain artifacts transfer and interference, and building a high-capacity unified foundation model for joint detection and localization. To address these challenges, we propose DeFakerOne, a data-centric, unified FIDL foundation model integrating InternVL2 and SAM2. DeFakerOne enables simultaneous image-level detection and pixel-level forgery localization across diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeFakerOne achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming baselines on 39 forgery detection benchmarks and 9 localization benchmarks. Furthermore, the model exhibits superior robustness against real-world perturbations and state-of-the-art generators such as GPT-Image-2. Finally, we provide a systematic analysis of data scaling laws, cross-domain artifacts transfer-interference patterns, the necessity of fine-grained supervision, and the original resolution artifacts preservation, highlighting the design principles for scalable, robust, and unified FIDL.

The rapid advancement of generative AI has enabled the creation of highly realistic and diverse synthetic images, posing critical challenges for image provenance and misinformation detection. This underscores the urgent need for effective image attribution. However, existing attribution datasets are constrained by limited scale, outdated generation methods, and insufficient semantic diversity - hindering the development of robust and generalizable attribution models. To address these limitations, we introduce ImageAttributionBench, a comprehensive dataset comprising images synthesized by a wide array of advanced generative models with state-of-the-art (SOTA) architectures. Covering multiple real-world semantic domains, the dataset offers rich diversity and scale to support and accelerate progress in image attribution research. To simulate real-world attribution scenarios, we evaluate several SOTA attribution methods on ImageAttributionBench under two challenging settings: (1) training on a standard balanced split and testing on degraded images, and (2) training and testing on semantically disjoint splits. In both cases, current methods exhibit consistently poor performance, revealing significant limitations in their robustness and generalization to unseen semantic content. Our work provides a rigorous benchmark to facilitate the development and evaluation of future image attribution methods.

The proliferation of sophisticated image editing tools and generative artificial intelligence models has made verifying the authenticity of digital images increasingly challenging, with important implications for journalism, forensic analysis, and public trust. Although numerous forensic algorithms, ranging from handcrafted methods to deep learning-based detectors, have been developed for manipulation detection, individual methods often suffer from limited robustness, fragmented evidence, or weak generalization across manipulation types and image conditions. To address these limitations, we present FRAME, a method for Forensic Routing and Adaptive Multi-path Evidence fusion for image manipulation detection. FRAME organizes diverse forensic algorithms into a multi-path analysis space, adaptively selects informative forensic paths for each input image, and fuses complementary evidence to improve detection and localization performance. By moving beyond single-method analysis and fixed fusion strategies, FRAME provides a more robust and flexible approach to image forensic reasoning while preserving interpretable forensic cues from multiple evidence sources. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FRAME across diverse manipulation scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/kzhao5/FRAME.

Nearly a decade of Machine Learning (ML) research on deepfake detection has been organized around a threat model inherited from 2017--2019, revolving around face-swap and talking-head manipulation of public figures, motivated by concerns about large-scale misinformation and video-evidence fraud. This position paper argues that the threat the field prepared for did not arrive, and the threats that did arrive are substantially different. An accounting of deepfake incidents in 2022--2026 shows that the dominant observed harms are peer-generated Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), voice-clone scam calls targeting families and finance workers, and emotional-manipulation fraud. The predicted large-scale public-figure deepfake catastrophe did not materialize during the 2024 global information environment despite extensive preparation. Meanwhile, research effort, benchmarks, and detection methods remain concentrated on the inherited threat model. The central claim of this paper is that this misalignment is now the dominant bottleneck on real-world deepfake defense, not model capability. We argue the ML research community should substantially rebalance its research agenda toward the harm categories that are actually growing. We support this position with empirical accounting of research effort and harm distribution, identify the structural reasons the misalignment persists, and outline three concrete technical research agendas for the under-defended harm categories.

Text-guided inpainting has made image forgery increasingly realistic, challenging both SID and IFL. However, existing methods often struggle to point out suspicious signals across domains. To address this problem, we propose EDGER, a patch-based, dual-branch framework that localizes manipulated regions in arbitrary resolution images without sacrificing native resolution. The first branch, Edge-Guided Segmentation, introduces a Frequency-based Edge Detector to emphasize high-frequency inconsistencies at manipulation boundaries, and fine-tunes a SegFormer to fuse RGB and edge features for pixel-level masks. Since edge evidence is most informative only when patches contain both authentic and manipulated pixels, we complement Edge-Guided Segmentation with a Synthetic Heatmapping branch, a classification-based localizer that fine-tunes a CLIP-ViT image encoder with LoRA to flag fully synthetic patches. Together, Synthetic Heatmapping provides coarse, patch-level synthetic priors, while Edge-Guided Segmentation sharpens boundaries within partially manipulated patches, yielding comprehensive localization. Evaluated in the MediaEval 2025, SynthIM challenge, Manipulated Region Localization Task's setting, our approach scales to multi-megapixel imagery and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization. Extensive ablations highlight the complementary roles of frequency-based edge cues and patch-level synthetic priors in driving accurate, resolution-agnostic localization.

The swift advancement in photo-realistic face generation technology has sparked considerable concerns across society and academia, emphasizing the requirement of generalizable face forgery detection and localization methods. Prior works tend to capture face forgery patterns across multiple domains using image modality, other modalities like fine-grained texts are not comprehensively investigated, which restricts the generalization capability of models. Besides, they usually analyze facial images created by GAN, but struggle to identify and localize those synthesized by diffusion. To solve the problems, in this paper, we devise a novel multi-domain fine-grained vision-language reconstruction (MFVLR) model, which explores comprehensive and diverse visual forgery traces via language-guided face forgery representation learning, to achieve generalizable diffusion-synthesized face forgery detection and localization (DFFDL). Specifically, we devise a fine-grained language transformer that studies general fine-grained language embeddings using language reconstruction. We propose a multi-domain vision encoder to capture general and complementary visual forgery patterns across the image and residual domains. A vision decoder is designed to reconstruct image appearance and achieve forgery localization. Besides, we propose an innovative plug-and-play vision injection module to enhance the interaction between the vision and language embeddings. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that our network outperforms the state of the art on different settings like cross-generator, cross-forgery, and cross-dataset evaluations.

With the rapid development of deep generative models, forged facial images are massively exploited for illegal activities. Although existing synthetic face detection methods have achieved significant progress, they suffer from the inherent limitation of overconfidence due to their reliance on the Softmax activation function. Thus, these methods often lead to unreliable predictions when encountering unknown Out-of-Distribution (OOD) images, and cannot ascertain the model's uncertainty in its prediction. Meanwhile, most existing methods require massive high-quality annotated data, which greatly limits their practicability across diverse scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose EMSFD (Evidence-based decision Modeling for Synthetic Face Detection with uncertainty-driven active learning), an approach designed to enhance detection reliability and generalizability. Specifically, EMSFD models class evidence using the Dirichlet distribution and explicitly incorporates model uncertainty into the prediction process. Furthermore, during training, the estimated uncertainty is exploited to prioritize more informative samples from the unlabeled pool for annotation, thereby reducing labeling cost and improving model generalization. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method enhances the interpretability of synthetic face detection. Meanwhile, our method yields a 15% increase in accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, which demonstrates the superior detection performance and generalizability of our approach. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hzx111621/EMSFD.

Recent generative models can produce images that appear highly realistic, raising challenges in distinguishing real and AI-generated images. Yet existing detectors based on pre-trained feature extractors tend to over-rely on global semantics, limiting sensitivity to the critical micro-defects. In this work, we propose Micro-Defects expose Macro-Fakes (MDMF), a local distribution-aware detection framework that amplifies micro-scale statistical irregularities into macro-level distributional discrepancies. To avoid localized forensic cues being diluted by plain aggregation, we introduce a learnable Patch Forensic Signature that projects semantic patch embeddings into a compact forensic latent space. We then use Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to quantify distributional discrepancies between generated and real images. Our theory-grounded analysis shows that patch-wise modeling yields provably larger discrepancies when localized forensic signals are present in generated images, enabling more reliable separation from real images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDMF consistently outperforms baseline detectors across multiple benchmarks, validating its general effectiveness. Project page: https://zbox1005.github.io/MDMF-project/

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated images have become increasingly realistic and readily adaptable to concrete real-world claims, creating new challenges for verifying visual evidence. A concrete emerging risk is AI-generated refund fraud, in which manipulated or synthetic images are used to support claims about damaged products, poor delivery conditions, or service-related defects. Existing AI-generated image detection benchmarks mainly evaluate standalone authenticity classification, cross-generator transfer, or forensic localization, leaving claim-conditioned fraudulent evidence detection underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce FraudBench, a multimodal benchmark for detecting AI-generated fraudulent refund evidence. FraudBench is constructed from real-world user-review evidence across e-commerce, food delivery, and travel-service scenarios. We curate real evidence images together with their associated review and product metadata, identify genuine damaged and undamaged evidence through MLLM-assisted filtering and human annotation, and synthesize fake-damaged evidence from genuine undamaged reference images using six state-of-the-art image editing and generation models. Using FraudBench, we evaluate MLLMs, specialized AI-generated image detectors, and human participants under the same settings. Experiments show that current MLLMs often recognize real-damaged evidence but fail on many fake-damaged subsets, with fake-damage detection rates (TPR) far below the 50% baseline on most generator subsets. Specialized detectors generally perform better but remain inconsistent across generators and can produce false positives on real-damaged samples, revealing a clear gap between generic AI image detection and reliable claim-conditioned refund-evidence verification.

Forensic analysis of AI-edited images requires more than binary real-versus-fake prediction: a useful system should localize the edit, identify its semantic type, and ground its decisions in visual evidence. Existing image-forensics datasets typically emphasize detection or localization, while reasoning-supervised vision-language datasets rarely target image manipulation and often rely on LLM-generated rationales whose faithfulness is difficult to verify. We introduce EditSleuth, a dataset of 257,725 image-edit triplets constructed from existing image-editing corpora for grounded image-edit forensic reasoning. Each example includes an edited image, its source image, a binary edit mask, a 12-class edit taxonomy label, a difficulty score, and a six-step reasoning chain. EditSleuth chains are generated deterministically from triplet-grounded upstream artifacts, with each statement tied to a specific computable source of evidence. Our analysis reveals that a naive four-component difficulty formulation suffers from a rank-2 correlation collapse among magnitude features; a simplified three-component formulation substantially increases score dispersion on both Pico-Banana and MagicBrush. Difficulty also varies meaningfully within most edit categories, indicating that the score is not a proxy for edit type. As an initial learning study, we fine-tune Qwen2-VL-2B with LoRA and find that chain-as-target supervision matches a label-only baseline on classification accuracy among parseable answers, while additionally yielding grounded explanatory prose that label-only supervision cannot produce. We release the dataset, the deterministic construction pipeline, and pilot training scripts.

As synthetic images become increasingly realistic, reliable synthetic image detection techniques are of pressing need to prevent their misuse. Despite satisfactory in-distribution performance, deep neural network-based synthetic image detectors (SIDs) lack reliability in deployment and often fail in the presence of common covariate shifts, resulting in poor detection accuracy. To avoid the risk caused by potential errors, we adopt a selective classification (SC) strategy by allowing SIDs to abstain from making low confidence predictions. For practicality, we focus on post-hoc methods which perform confidence estimation on a given SID without retraining. However, we show that conventional logit-based confidence score functions (CSFs) exhibit pathological behavior under covariate shifts, leading to SC performance close to or even worse than random guessing. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective SC framework for Reliable Synthetic Image Detection (ReSIDe). First, we generalize the notion of logits to an SID's intermediate layers from a centroid matching perspective, extending the use of logit-based CSFs to any layer of an SID. Then, we introduce a preference optimization algorithm that aggregates confidence scores extracted from different layers to a final confidence estimate by minimizing an upper bound of the area under the risk-coverage curve (AURC). Extensive experimental results show that ReSIDe significantly boosts the SC performance of various logit-based CSFs under common covariate shifts, achieving up to 69.55% AURC reduction.

Detecting AI-generated images across unseen architectures remains challenging, as existing models often overfit to generator-specific fingerprints and semantic content rather than learning universal forgery traces. We attribute this failure to feature entanglement: detectors learn these factors as a single entangled representation, where universal forgery traces are inextricably confounded with both generator-specific fingerprints and semantic content. Crucially, our spectral analysis reveals that this entanglement is avoidable: distinct generator-specific fingerprints (e.g., GAN stripes vs. Diffusion Model spots) occupy disjoint frequency subspaces and coexist as independent superpositions. Leveraging this physical orthogonality, we propose the Orthogonal Decomposition and Purification Network (ODP-Net) to structurally disentangle these factors. Specifically, ODP-Net employs (1) Instance-aware Orthogonal Decomposition to project features into mutually exclusive subspaces: universal forgery traces, generator-specific fingerprints, and semantic content; (2) Perturbation-based Purification to enforce semantic invariance via cross-sample feature injection; and (3) Manifold Alignment to bridge domain gaps. By explicitly decoupling universal forgery traces from generator-specific fingerprints and semantic content, ODP-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on unseen architectures (e.g., Stable Diffusion 3), validating that structural disentanglement is key to generalization.

The misuse of generative AI in online disinformation campaigns highlights the urgent need for transparent and explainable detection systems. In this work, we investigate how detectors for AI-generated images can be more effective in providing human-understandable explanations for their predictions. To this end, we develop a suite of detectors with various architectures and fine-tuning strategies, trained on our large-scale photorealistic fake image dataset, AIText2Image, and assess their performance on state-of-the-art text-to-image AI generators. We integrate 16 different explainable AI (XAI) methods into our detection framework, and the visual explanations are comprehensively refined and evaluated through a novel approach that prioritizes human understanding of AI-generated images, using both textual and visual responses collected from a survey of 100 participants. This framework offers insights into visual-language cues in fake image detection and into the clarity of XAI methods from a human perspective, measuring the alignment of XAI outputs with human preferences.

The rapid proliferation of AI-generated images (AIGI) presents a significant challenge to digital information integrity. While human observers and existing detection models struggle to keep pace with the increasing sophistication of generative models, the need for robust, real-time detection systems has become critical. This paper introduces SPECTRA-Net, a scalable pipeline for explainable, cross-domain tensor representations for AIGI detection. Our approach leverages a multi-view representation of images, combining global semantic features from a Vision Foundation Model (VFM), spectral analysis, local patch-based anomaly detection, and statistical descriptors. By fusing these complementary data streams, SPECTRA-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and cross-domain settings, demonstrating high accuracy and generalization capabilities across a wide range of challenging datasets, including WildFake, Chameleon, and RRDataset. The proposed pipeline not only provides a robust solution for AIGI detection but also offers explainability through artifact localization, paving the way for more trustworthy and reliable content verification in real-world applications.

The rapid advancement of generative technologies has made synthetic images nearly indistinguishable from real ones, thereby creating an urgent need for robust detectors to counter misinformation. However, existing methods mainly rely on universal artifact features that are shared across multiple generators. We observe that as the diversity of generators increases, the overlap of these common features gradually decreases. This severely undermines model generalization. In contrast, focusing only on unique artifacts tends to cause overfitting to specific forgery patterns. To address this challenge, we propose LEGO (LoRA-Enabled Generator-Oriented Framework). The core mechanism of LEGO employs an MLP to modulate multiple LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) blocks, each pretrained to capture the unique artifacts of a specific generator, followed by attention-based feature fusion. Unlike conventional methods that seek a single universal solution, LEGO delegates unique artifact extraction to specialized LoRA modules by dividing its training procedure into two stages. Each LoRA module is individually trained on a single-generator dataset to learn generator-specific representations, then MLP and attention layers are trained on mixed datasets to dynamically regulate the contribution of each module. Benefiting from its modular yet robust design, LEGO can be naturally extended by incorporating new LoRA modules for adaptation to newly emerging next-generation datasets, while still achieving substantially better performance than prior SOTA methods with fewer than 30,000 training images, less than 10% of their training data, and only 5 epochs in each training stage.

The rapid advancement in generative AI models has enabled the creation of photorealistic images. At the same time, there are growing concerns about the potential misuse and dangers of generated content, as well as a pressing need for effective AI-generated image detectors. However, current training-based detection techniques are typically computationally costly and can hardly be generalized to unseen data domains, while training-free methods fall short in detection performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a search-based method employing data embedding sensitivity in intermediate layers to detect AI-generated images. Given a set of real and AI-generated images, our method examines the similarity between original image embeddings and perturbed image embeddings, and detects AI-generated images based on the similarity. We examine the proposed method on two comprehensive benchmarks: GenImage and Forensics Small. Our method exhibits improved performance across different datasets compared to both training-free and training-based state-of-the-art methods. On average, our method achieves the largest performance gain on the Forensics Small benchmark by 39.61% compared to the best training-free method and 5.14% compared to the best training-based method in AUROC score.

The rapid advancement of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced significant challenges for reliable AI-generated image detection. Existing detectors often suffer from performance degradation under distribution shifts and when encountering newly emerging generative models. In this work, we propose a data-centric continual adaptation framework for updating detectors in evolving environments. We show that both in-the-wild data and generator-driven data are essential for adapting detectors. We introduce an automated, weakly supervised pipeline for constructing in-the-wild datasets through fact-check article retrieval. Additionally, we demonstrate that incorporating even a small amount of generator-driven data during training enables effective adaptation to newly emerging models, while combining it with in-the-wild data within a continual learning framework enables robust adaptation and mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on two state-of-the-art detectors show significant improvements of +9.14% and +8% in average accuracy, respectively.

We introduce AEGIS, A holistic benchmark for Evaluating forensic analysis of AI-Generated academic ImageS. Compared to existing benchmarks, AEGIS features three key advances: (1) Domain-Specific Complexity: covering seven academic categories with 39 fine-grained subtypes, exposing intrinsic forensic difficulty, where even GPT-5.1 reaches 48.80% overall performance and expert models achieve only limited localization accuracy (IoU 30.09%); (2) Diverse Forgery Simulations: modeling four prevalent academic forgery strategies across 25 generative models, with 11 yielding average forensic accuracy below 50%, showing that forensics lag behind generative advances; and (3) Multi-Dimensional Forensic Evaluation: jointly assessing detection, reasoning, and localization, revealing complementary strengths between model families, with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) at 84.74% accuracy in textual artifact recognition and expert detectors peaking at 79.54% accuracy in binary authenticity detection. By evaluating 25 leading MLLMs, nine expert models, and one unified multimodal understanding and generation model, AEGIS serves as a diagnostic testbed exposing fundamental limitations in academic image forensics.

The rapid evolution of generative models has enabled the creation of highly realistic and diverse synthetic images, posing significant challenges to reliable and generalizable Synthetic Image Detection (SID). However, existing detectors are typically trained on limited and biased datasets, resulting in poor generalization to unseen generators. To address this issue, we propose HiMix, a unified framework that enhances generalization by expanding the training distribution and promoting artifact-aware representations. Specifically, the Mixup-driven Distributional Augmentation (MDA) module constructs continuous transitional samples between real and fake images, improving coverage of low-confidence regions and exposing the model to more challenging samples, while the pixel-wise mixup operation smoothly perturbs semantics to enhance sensitivity to low-level artifacts. Moreover, the Hierarchical Artifact-aware Representation (HAR) module aggregates artifact information from both global and local levels through cross-layer integration and coarse-to-fine feature fusion, enabling the extraction of discriminative forgery representations under diverse distributions. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that HiMix achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing well-separated logits for improved generalization to unseen forgeries.

AI-generated images are becoming increasingly realistic and diverse, posing significant challenges for generalizable detection. While Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) provide rich semantic representations and frequency-based methods capture complementary artifact cues, existing approaches that combine these modalities still suffer from limited generalization, with notable performance degradation on unseen generative models. We attribute this limitation to two key factors: frequency shortcut bias toward easily distinguishable cues associated with specific generators and cross-domain representation conflict between high-level semantics and low-level frequency patterns. To address these issues, we propose a Frequency-aware Gated Injection Network (FGINet) to improve generalization. Specifically, we design a Band-Masked Frequency Encoder (BMFE) that applies cross-band masking in the frequency domain to reduce reliance on generator-specific patterns and encourage more diverse and generalizable representations. We further introduce a Layer-wise Gated Frequency Injection (LGFI) mechanism to progressively inject frequency cues into the VFM backbone with adaptive gating, aligning with its hierarchical abstraction and alleviating representation conflict. Moreover, we propose a Hyperspherical Compactness Learning (HCL) framework with a cosine margin objective to learn compact and well-separated representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FGINet achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization across multiple challenging datasets.

Recent methods demonstrate that large-scale pretrained models, such as CLIP vision transformers, effectively detect AI-generated images (AIGIs) from unseen generative models when used as feature extractors. Many state-of-the-art methods for AI-generated image detection build upon the original CLIP-ViT to enhance this generalization. Since CLIP's release, numerous vision foundation models (VFMs) have emerged, incorporating architectural improvements and different training paradigms. Despite these advances, their potential for AIGI detection and AI image forensics remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present a comprehensive benchmark across multiple VFM families, covering diverse pretraining objectives, input resolutions, and model scales. We systematically evaluate their out-of-the-box performance for detecting fully-generated AI-images and AI-inpainted images, and discover that the best model outperforms the original CLIP by more than 12% in accuracy, beating established approaches in the process. To fully leverage the features of a modern VFM, we propose a simple redesign of the classifier head by utilizing tunable attention pooling (TAP), which aggregates output tokens into a refined global representation. Integrating TAP with the latest VFMs yields substantial performance gains across several AIGI detection benchmarks, establishing a new state-of-the-art on two challenging benchmarks for in-the-wild detection of AI-generated and -inpainted images.

OpenAI's GPT-Image-2 has effectively erased the visual boundary between authentic and AI-edited document images: a single number on a receipt can be replaced in under a second for a few cents. We release AIForge-Doc v2, a paired dataset of 3,066 GPT-Image-2 document forgeries with pixel-precise masks in DocTamper-compatible format, and benchmark four lines of defence: human inspectors (N=120, n=365 pair-votes via the public 2AFC site CanUSpotAI.com), TruFor (generic forensic), DocTamper (qcf-568, document-specific), and the same GPT-Image-2 model as a zero-shot self-judge -- asked, to avoid the trivial "image is mostly real" reading, whether any region was generated or edited by an AI image model. Human 2AFC accuracy is 0.501, indistinguishable from chance: even side-by-side, inspectors cannot tell GPT-Image-2 receipt forgeries from authentic counterparts. The three computational judges sit only modestly above (TruFor 0.599, DocTamper 0.585, self-judge 0.532). The self-judge fails consistently, not by chance: across five prompt strategies and four policies for handling ambiguous responses, AUC never rises above 0.59. To rule out the possibility that the two forensic detectors are broken on our source domain rather than blind to AI inpainting, we calibrate each on a same-domain traditional-tampering set built for its training distribution: TruFor reaches AUC 0.962 on cross-camera splicing of our dataset, DocTamper reaches 0.852 on cross-document OCR-token splicing with two-pass JPEG re-encoding. Both retain near-published performance on traditional tampering; switching to GPT-Image-2 inpainting drops AUC by 0.27-0.36 (0.962->0.599 TruFor; 0.852->0.585 DocTamper), isolating a detection gap specific to GPT-Image-2 inpainting. We release the dataset, pipeline, four-judge protocol, and calibration sets.

In recent years, significant progress has been made in both image generation and generated image detection. Despite their rapid, yet largely independent, development, these two fields have evolved distinct architectural paradigms: the former predominantly relies on generative networks, while the latter favors discriminative frameworks. A recent trend in both domains is the use of adversarial information to enhance performance, revealing potential for synergy. However, the significant architectural divergence between them presents considerable challenges. Departing from previous approaches, we propose UniGenDet: a Unified generative-discriminative framework for co-evolutionary image Generation and generated image Detection. To bridge the task gap, we design a symbiotic multimodal self-attention mechanism and a unified fine-tuning algorithm. This synergy allows the generation task to improve the interpretability of authenticity identification, while authenticity criteria guide the creation of higher-fidelity images. Furthermore, we introduce a detector-informed generative alignment mechanism to facilitate seamless information exchange. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code: https://github.com/Zhangyr2022/UniGenDet.

Generative AI has enabled the creation of photorealistic images and videos that are increasingly disseminated on social media, often used for spam, misinformation, manipulation, and fraud. Existing AI-generated content (AIGC) detection methods face challenges including poor generalization to new generation models, reliance on single modalities, and lack of interpretable explanations. We present our pipeline that mitigates these issues by continuously curating diverse multi-modal social media data and training a compact vision-language model for detection and explanation. Our model achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on public benchmarks and demonstrates robust detection and explanation capabilities on internal social media datasets across multiple platforms. We deployed our model for post recommendation on social media platforms and observed positive downstream impacts on user engagement, demonstrating that it is feasible to perform effective AIGC detection in dynamic, real-world social media environments.

AI-generated imagery has reached near-photorealistic fidelity, yet this technology poses significant threats to information security and societal trust. Existing deepfake detection methods often exhibit limited robustness in open-world scenarios. To address this limitation, this paper investigates intrinsic discrepancies between synthetic and authentic images from a signal-level perspective. Our analysis reveals that low-correlation signals serve as distinctive markers for differentiating AI-generated imagery from real photographs. Building on this insight, we introduce a novel method for quantifying these signals based on fractal theory. By analyzing the fractal characteristics of low-correlation signals, our method effectively captures the subtle statistical anomalies inherent to the synthesis process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the method's robustness and superior detection performance. This work emphasizes the need to shift research focus to a new signal-level direction for deepfake detection. Theoretically, this proposed approach is not limited to face image identification but can be applied to all AI-generated image detection tasks. This study provides a new research direction for deepfake detection.