This work establishes a new paradigm for generated image detection by recasting the detection task as a problem of machine unlearning, and introduces two detection methods: data-free detection, which prunes model parameters to induce unlearning without data access, and data-driven detection, which optimizes LVMs to unlearn knowledge tied to generated images.
Abstract
Robust detection of generated images is critical to counter the misuse of generative models. Existing methods primarily depend on learning from human-annotated training datasets, limiting their generalization to unseen distributions. In contrast, large-scale vision models (LVMs) pre-trained on web-scale datasets exhibit exceptional generalization power through exposure to diverse distributions, offering a transformative paradigm for this task. However, our experimental results reveal that LVMs pre-trained on natural-image-dominated data can effectively capture the features of both natural and generated images, yielding comparably low losses and thus limited discriminative capacity between them. This prompts a key question: When and how do LVMs exhibit different behaviors when capturing features of natural and generated images? This investigation reveals an insight: during unlearning, LVMs exhibit disparate forgetting dynamics with feature degradation for generated images escalating faster than natural ones. Inspired by the disparate dynamics, we introduce two detection methods: 1) data-free detection, which prunes model parameters to induce unlearning without data access, and 2) data-driven detection, which optimizes LVMs to unlearn knowledge tied to generated images. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmarks demonstrate that our unlearning-based approach outperforms conventional detection methods. By recasting the detection task as a problem of machine unlearning, our work establishes a new paradigm for generated image detection.
The rapid advancement of large-scale generative models has accelerated the spread of highly deceptive AI-generated images, making generalized synthetic image detection a critical imperative. Existing forensic networks often struggle with cross-model generalization and realworld degradations due to their reliance on single-domain representations and conventional binary classification optimization. To overcome these limitations, we propose RNSIDNet, a novel forensic framework that achieves robust detection through enhanced RGB-Noise representation learning. Specifically, our method employs a dual-branch architecture where global RGB semantics, extracted by an attention-refined CLIP backbone, dynamically modulate highfrequency noise artifacts captured by Bayar convolutions via a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) module. To further enhance the learned representations, we design a Hard Sample-aware Contrastive Learning (HSCL) strategy. By explicitly penalizing challenging training samples, HSCL reshapes the latent feature space to maximize the discriminative margin between pristine and synthetic domains. Extensive experiments across eight public benchmark datasets verify that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering superior generalization ability, robustness, and computational efficiency. Code and dataset will be publicly available on https://github.com/multimediaFor/RNSIDNet.
Zhen Li, Gang Cao, Tianyi Zhang et al.· 0 citations
This work formats the AI-generated image detection task as a Visual Question Answering problem, leveraging a fine-tuned vision-language framework to fully exploit the complementary information between visual and textual modalities, and proposes a novel high-resolution AI-generated image detector, termed LHSDet.
Qian Yao, Jun-Jie Huang, Yongjun Wang et al.· 0 citations
The rapid advancement of generative AI has enabled the creation of highly realistic deepfake media, posing significant threats, including misinformation, digital identity theft, fraud, and manipulation of public opinion. AI-generated image (AIGI) detection is reliably challenging due to the diversity of generative methods and the subtle artifacts they leave behind. In this work, we propose GenRes, a novel framework for generative residual learning via a neural tensor network, which models fine-grained relational features between original and transformed samples to enhance generalization. To address scenarios involving multiple generative transformations, we introduce GenRes++, which employs a learnable attention mechanism to aggregate relational features across multiple transformed samples and enables the model to focus on the most informative cues. Both models leverage PE-Core as a feature extractor, providing generalized and semantically rich embeddings that improve cross-domain performance and enable the detection of AIGI generated by unseen methods. Comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed GenRes++ approach outperforms existing methods.
Kutub Uddin, Nusrat Tasnim, Awais Khan et al.· 2 citations
PPM-CLIP is proposed, a new framework that shifts from static classification to conditional generative modeling based on the CLIP vision-language model, and a Probabilistic Prompt Modeling module is used as a generator that produces an adaptive distribution of prompts according to the input image.
Xinyu Wang, Yingxin Lai, Zhiming Luo et al.· 0 citations
GenSyn10 is introduced, a CIFAR-10-aligned synthetic image dataset of 60,000 images generated using three architecturally diverse state-of-the-art models, enabling controlled and systematic evaluation of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization to novel generators.
Md Faraz Kabir Khan, Saeed Anwar, G. Hassan· 0 citations
