A Bias-Free Training Paradigm for More General AI-generated Image Detection

Successful forensic detectors can produce excellent results in supervised learning benchmarks but struggle to transfer to real-world applications. We believe this limitation is largely due to inadequate training data quality. While most research focuses on developing new algorithms, less attention is given to training data selection, despite evidence that performance can be strongly impacted by spurious correlations such as content, format, or resolution. A well-designed forensic detector should detect generator specific artifacts rather than reflect data biases. To this end, we propose B-Free, a bias-free training paradigm, where fake images are generated from real ones using the conditioning procedure of stable diffusion models. This ensures semantic alignment between real and fake images, allowing any differences to stem solely from the subtle artifacts introduced by AI generation. Through content-based augmentation, we show significant improvements in both generalization and robustness over state-of-the-art detectors and more calibrated results across 27 different generative models, including recent releases, like FLUX and Stable Diffusion 3.5. Our findings emphasize the importance of a careful dataset curation, highlighting the need for further research in dataset design. Code and data will be publicly available at https://grip-unina.github.io/B-Free/

M3Dsynth: A dataset of medical 3D images with AI-generated local manipulations

The ability to detect manipulated visual content is becoming increasingly important in many application fields, given the rapid advances in image synthesis methods. Of particular concern is the possibility of modifying the content of medical images, altering the resulting diagnoses. Despite its relevance, this issue has received limited attention from the research community. One reason is the lack of large and curated datasets to use for development and benchmarking purposes. Here, we investigate this issue and propose M3Dsynth, a large dataset of manipulated Computed Tomography (CT) lung images. We create manipulated images by injecting or removing lung cancer nodules in real CT scans, using three different methods based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) or Diffusion Models (DM), for a total of 8,577 manipulated samples. Experiments show that these images easily fool automated diagnostic tools. We also tested several state-of-the-art forensic detectors and demonstrated that, once trained on the proposed dataset, they are able to accurately detect and localize manipulated synthetic content, including when training and test sets are not aligned, showing good generalization ability. Dataset and code will be publicly available at https://grip-unina.github.io/M3Dsynth/.

On the detection of synthetic images generated by diffusion models

Over the past decade, there has been tremendous progress in creating synthetic media, mainly thanks to the development of powerful methods based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). Very recently, methods based on diffusion models (DM) have been gaining the spotlight. In addition to providing an impressive level of photorealism, they enable the creation of text-based visual content, opening up new and exciting opportunities in many different application fields, from arts to video games. On the other hand, this property is an additional asset in the hands of malicious users, who can generate and distribute fake media perfectly adapted to their attacks, posing new challenges to the media forensic community. With this work, we seek to understand how difficult it is to distinguish synthetic images generated by diffusion models from pristine ones and whether current state-of-the-art detectors are suitable for the task. To this end, first we expose the forensics traces left by diffusion models, then study how current detectors, developed for GAN-generated images, perform on these new synthetic images, especially in challenging social-networks scenarios involving image compression and resizing. Datasets and code are available at github.com/grip-unina/DMimageDetection.