Towards Generalizable Detector for Generated Image

Qianshu Cai, Chao Wu, Yonggang Zhang, Jun Yu, Xinmei Tian

Keywords: Generated image detection, OOD detection, Learnable OOD detection

TL;DR: We propose a novel perspective to understand AI-generated image detection through the lens of OOD detection and introduce a generalizable training-free generated image detection method.

Abstract:

The effective detection of generated images is crucial to mitigate potential risks associated with their misuse. Despite significant progress, a fundamental challenge remains: ensuring the generalizability of detectors. To address this, we propose a novel perspective on understanding and improving generated image detection, inspired by the human cognitive process: Humans identify an image as unnatural based on specific patterns because these patterns lie outside the space spanned by those of natural images. This is intrinsically related to out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, which identifies samples whose semantic patterns (i.e., labels) lie outside the semantic pattern space of in-distribution (ID) samples.
By treating patterns of generated images as OOD samples, we demonstrate that models trained merely over natural images bring guaranteed generalization ability under mild assumptions.
This transforms the generalization challenge of generated image detection into the problem of fitting natural image patterns.
Based on this insight, we propose a generalizable detection method through the lens of ID energy. Theoretical results capture the generalization risk of the proposed method. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Primary Area: Deep learning (e.g., architectures, generative models, optimization for deep networks, foundation models, LLMs)

Submission Number: 14114