Beyond Semantics: Uncovering the Physics of Fakes via Universal Physical Descriptors for Cross-Modal Synthetic Detection

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Qiu, Mei, Zhao, Jianqiang, Qu, Yanyun
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866917385917693952
author Qiu, Mei
Zhao, Jianqiang
Qu, Yanyun
author_facet Qiu, Mei
Zhao, Jianqiang
Qu, Yanyun
contents The rapid advancement of AI generated content (AIGC) has blurred the boundaries between real and synthetic images, exposing the limitations of existing deepfake detectors that often overfit to specific generative models. This adaptability crisis calls for a fundamental reexamination of the intrinsic physical characteristics that distinguish natural from AI-generated images. In this paper, we address two critical research questions: (1) What physical features can stably and robustly discriminate AI generated images across diverse datasets and generative architectures? (2) Can these objective pixel-level features be integrated into multimodal models like CLIP to enhance detection performance while mitigating the unreliability of language-based information? To answer these questions, we conduct a comprehensive exploration of 15 physical features across more than 20 datasets generated by various GANs and diffusion models. We propose a novel feature selection algorithm that identifies five core physical features including Laplacian variance, Sobel statistics, and residual noise variance that exhibit consistent discriminative power across all tested datasets. These features are then converted into text encoded values and integrated with semantic captions to guide image text representation learning in CLIP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple Genimage benchmarks, with near-perfect accuracy (99.8%) on datasets such as Wukong and SDv1.4. By bridging pixel level authenticity with semantic understanding, this work pioneers the use of physically grounded features for trustworthy vision language modeling and opens new directions for mitigating hallucinations and textual inaccuracies in large multimodal models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_04608
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Semantics: Uncovering the Physics of Fakes via Universal Physical Descriptors for Cross-Modal Synthetic Detection
Qiu, Mei
Zhao, Jianqiang
Qu, Yanyun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The rapid advancement of AI generated content (AIGC) has blurred the boundaries between real and synthetic images, exposing the limitations of existing deepfake detectors that often overfit to specific generative models. This adaptability crisis calls for a fundamental reexamination of the intrinsic physical characteristics that distinguish natural from AI-generated images. In this paper, we address two critical research questions: (1) What physical features can stably and robustly discriminate AI generated images across diverse datasets and generative architectures? (2) Can these objective pixel-level features be integrated into multimodal models like CLIP to enhance detection performance while mitigating the unreliability of language-based information? To answer these questions, we conduct a comprehensive exploration of 15 physical features across more than 20 datasets generated by various GANs and diffusion models. We propose a novel feature selection algorithm that identifies five core physical features including Laplacian variance, Sobel statistics, and residual noise variance that exhibit consistent discriminative power across all tested datasets. These features are then converted into text encoded values and integrated with semantic captions to guide image text representation learning in CLIP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple Genimage benchmarks, with near-perfect accuracy (99.8%) on datasets such as Wukong and SDv1.4. By bridging pixel level authenticity with semantic understanding, this work pioneers the use of physically grounded features for trustworthy vision language modeling and opens new directions for mitigating hallucinations and textual inaccuracies in large multimodal models.
title Beyond Semantics: Uncovering the Physics of Fakes via Universal Physical Descriptors for Cross-Modal Synthetic Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04608