Reduce the Artifacts Bias for More Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework combining reconstruction and GAN-based upsampling artifacts, with a specialized fusion method, to improve generalizable AI-generated image detection across diverse methods.

Contribution

It proposes a Separate Expert Fusion framework that leverages domain-specific experts and decoupled fusion to enhance detection robustness against various generative models.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on 13 benchmarks.

Effectively captures diverse artifact patterns.

Improves generalization across multiple generative techniques.

Abstract

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.