Decoupling Semantics and Fingerprints: A Universal Representation for AI-Generated Image Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Zhiyuan, Chen, Yanxiang, Zhao, Pengcheng, Diao, Yunfeng, Liao, Xin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wang, Zhiyuan
Chen, Yanxiang
Zhao, Pengcheng
Diao, Yunfeng
Liao, Xin
author_facet Wang, Zhiyuan
Chen, Yanxiang
Zhao, Pengcheng
Diao, Yunfeng
Liao, Xin
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07074
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decoupling Semantics and Fingerprints: A Universal Representation for AI-Generated Image Detection
Wang, Zhiyuan
Chen, Yanxiang
Zhao, Pengcheng
Diao, Yunfeng
Liao, Xin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
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.
title Decoupling Semantics and Fingerprints: A Universal Representation for AI-Generated Image Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07074