Forensic Self-Descriptions Are All You Need for Zero-Shot Detection, Open-Set Source Attribution, and Clustering of AI-generated Images

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nguyen, Tai D., Azizpour, Aref, Stamm, Matthew C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nguyen, Tai D.
Azizpour, Aref
Stamm, Matthew C.
author_facet Nguyen, Tai D.
Azizpour, Aref
Stamm, Matthew C.
contents The emergence of advanced AI-based tools to generate realistic images poses significant challenges for forensic detection and source attribution, especially as new generative techniques appear rapidly. Traditional methods often fail to generalize to unseen generators due to reliance on features specific to known sources during training. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that explicitly models forensic microstructures - subtle, pixel-level patterns unique to the image creation process. Using only real images in a self-supervised manner, we learn a set of diverse predictive filters to extract residuals that capture different aspects of these microstructures. By jointly modeling these residuals across multiple scales, we obtain a compact model whose parameters constitute a unique forensic self-description for each image. This self-description enables us to perform zero-shot detection of synthetic images, open-set source attribution of images, and clustering based on source without prior knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy and adaptability compared to competing techniques, advancing the state of the art in synthetic media forensics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_21003
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Forensic Self-Descriptions Are All You Need for Zero-Shot Detection, Open-Set Source Attribution, and Clustering of AI-generated Images
Nguyen, Tai D.
Azizpour, Aref
Stamm, Matthew C.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The emergence of advanced AI-based tools to generate realistic images poses significant challenges for forensic detection and source attribution, especially as new generative techniques appear rapidly. Traditional methods often fail to generalize to unseen generators due to reliance on features specific to known sources during training. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that explicitly models forensic microstructures - subtle, pixel-level patterns unique to the image creation process. Using only real images in a self-supervised manner, we learn a set of diverse predictive filters to extract residuals that capture different aspects of these microstructures. By jointly modeling these residuals across multiple scales, we obtain a compact model whose parameters constitute a unique forensic self-description for each image. This self-description enables us to perform zero-shot detection of synthetic images, open-set source attribution of images, and clustering based on source without prior knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy and adaptability compared to competing techniques, advancing the state of the art in synthetic media forensics.
title Forensic Self-Descriptions Are All You Need for Zero-Shot Detection, Open-Set Source Attribution, and Clustering of AI-generated Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21003