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/

RaCMC: Residual-Aware Compensation Network with Multi-Granularity Constraints for Fake News Detection

Multimodal fake news detection aims to automatically identify real or fake news, thereby mitigating the adverse effects caused by such misinformation. Although prevailing approaches have demonstrated their effectiveness, challenges persist in cross-modal feature fusion and refinement for classification. To address this, we present a residual-aware compensation network with multi-granularity constraints (RaCMC) for fake news detection, that aims to sufficiently interact and fuse cross-modal features while amplifying the differences between real and fake news. First, a multiscale residual-aware compensation module is designed to interact and fuse features at different scales, and ensure both the consistency and exclusivity of feature interaction, thus acquiring high-quality features. Second, a multi-granularity constraints module is implemented to limit the distribution of both the news overall and the image-text pairs within the news, thus amplifying the differences between real and fake news at the news and feature levels. Finally, a dominant feature fusion reasoning module is developed to comprehensively evaluate news authenticity from the perspectives of both consistency and inconsistency. Experiments on three public datasets, including Weibo17, Politifact and GossipCop, reveal the superiority of the proposed method.

Towards Secure AI-driven Industrial Metaverse with NFT Digital Twins

The rise of the industrial metaverse has brought digital twins (DTs) to the forefront. Blockchain-powered non-fungible tokens (NFTs) offer a decentralized approach to creating and owning these cloneable DTs. However, the potential for unauthorized duplication, or counterfeiting, poses a significant threat to the security of NFT-DTs. Existing NFT clone detection methods often rely on static information like metadata and images, which can be easily manipulated. To address these limitations, we propose a novel deep-learning-based solution as a combination of an autoencoder and RNN-based classifier. This solution enables real-time pattern recognition to detect fake NFT-DTs. Additionally, we introduce the concept of dynamic metadata, providing a more reliable way to verify authenticity through AI-integrated smart contracts. By effectively identifying counterfeit DTs, our system contributes to strengthening the security of NFT-based assets in the metaverse.

Human vs. AI: A Novel Benchmark and a Comparative Study on the Detection of Generated Images and the Impact of Prompts

With the advent of publicly available AI-based text-to-image systems, the process of creating photorealistic but fully synthetic images has been largely democratized. This can pose a threat to the public through a simplified spread of disinformation. Machine detectors and human media expertise can help to differentiate between AI-generated (fake) and real images and counteract this danger. Although AI generation models are highly prompt-dependent, the impact of the prompt on the fake detection performance has rarely been investigated yet. This work therefore examines the influence of the prompt's level of detail on the detectability of fake images, both with an AI detector and in a user study. For this purpose, we create a novel dataset, COCOXGEN, which consists of real photos from the COCO dataset as well as images generated with SDXL and Fooocus using prompts of two standardized lengths. Our user study with 200 participants shows that images generated with longer, more detailed prompts are detected significantly more easily than those generated with short prompts. Similarly, an AI-based detection model achieves better performance on images generated with longer prompts. However, humans and AI models seem to pay attention to different details, as we show in a heat map analysis.

Region-Based Optimization in Continual Learning for Audio Deepfake Detection

Rapid advancements in speech synthesis and voice conversion bring convenience but also new security risks, creating an urgent need for effective audio deepfake detection. Although current models perform well, their effectiveness diminishes when confronted with the diverse and evolving nature of real-world deepfakes. To address this issue, we propose a continual learning method named Region-Based Optimization (RegO) for audio deepfake detection. Specifically, we use the Fisher information matrix to measure important neuron regions for real and fake audio detection, dividing them into four regions. First, we directly fine-tune the less important regions to quickly adapt to new tasks. Next, we apply gradient optimization in parallel for regions important only to real audio detection, and in orthogonal directions for regions important only to fake audio detection. For regions that are important to both, we use sample proportion-based adaptive gradient optimization. This region-adaptive optimization ensures an appropriate trade-off between memory stability and learning plasticity. Additionally, to address the increase of redundant neurons from old tasks, we further introduce the Ebbinghaus forgetting mechanism to release them, thereby promoting the capability of the model to learn more generalized discriminative features. Experimental results show our method achieves a 21.3% improvement in EER over the state-of-the-art continual learning approach RWM for audio deepfake detection. Moreover, the effectiveness of RegO extends beyond the audio deepfake detection domain, showing potential significance in other tasks, such as image recognition. The code is available at https://github.com/cyjie429/RegO

A Self-Learning Multimodal Approach for Fake News Detection

The rapid growth of social media has resulted in an explosion of online news content, leading to a significant increase in the spread of misleading or false information. While machine learning techniques have been widely applied to detect fake news, the scarcity of labeled datasets remains a critical challenge. Misinformation frequently appears as paired text and images, where a news article or headline is accompanied by a related visuals. In this paper, we introduce a self-learning multimodal model for fake news classification. The model leverages contrastive learning, a robust method for feature extraction that operates without requiring labeled data, and integrates the strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) to jointly analyze both text and image features. LLMs are excel at this task due to their ability to process diverse linguistic data drawn from extensive training corpora. Our experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art classification approaches, achieving over 85% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. These findings highlight the model's effectiveness in tackling the challenges of multimodal fake news detection.

Take Fake as Real: Realistic-like Robust Black-box Adversarial Attack to Evade AIGC Detection

The security of AI-generated content (AIGC) detection based on GANs and diffusion models is closely related to the credibility of multimedia content. Malicious adversarial attacks can evade these developing AIGC detection. However, most existing adversarial attacks focus only on GAN-generated facial images detection, struggle to be effective on multi-class natural images and diffusion-based detectors, and exhibit poor invisibility. To fill this gap, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of the vulnerability of AIGC detectors and discover the feature that detectors vary in vulnerability to different post-processing. Then, considering the uncertainty of detectors in real-world scenarios, and based on the discovery, we propose a Realistic-like Robust Black-box Adversarial attack (R$^2$BA) with post-processing fusion optimization. Unlike typical perturbations, R$^2$BA uses real-world post-processing, i.e., Gaussian blur, JPEG compression, Gaussian noise and light spot to generate adversarial examples. Specifically, we use a stochastic particle swarm algorithm with inertia decay to optimize post-processing fusion intensity and explore the detector's decision boundary. Guided by the detector's fake probability, R$^2$BA enhances/weakens the detector-vulnerable/detector-robust post-processing intensity to strike a balance between adversariality and invisibility. Extensive experiments on popular/commercial AIGC detectors and datasets demonstrate that R$^2$BA exhibits impressive anti-detection performance, excellent invisibility, and strong robustness in GAN-based and diffusion-based cases. Compared to state-of-the-art white-box and black-box attacks, R$^2$BA shows significant improvements of 15% and 21% in anti-detection performance under the original and robust scenario respectively, offering valuable insights for the security of AIGC detection in real-world applications.

Understanding and Improving Training-Free AI-Generated Image Detections with Vision Foundation Models

The rapid advancement of generative models has introduced serious risks, including deepfake techniques for facial synthesis and editing. Traditional approaches rely on training classifiers and enhancing generalizability through various feature extraction techniques. Meanwhile, training-free detection methods address issues like limited data and overfitting by directly leveraging statistical properties from vision foundation models to distinguish between real and fake images. The current leading training-free approach, RIGID, utilizes DINOv2 sensitivity to perturbations in image space for detecting fake images, with fake image embeddings exhibiting greater sensitivity than those of real images. This observation prompts us to investigate how detection performance varies across model backbones, perturbation types, and datasets. Our experiments reveal that detection performance is closely linked to model robustness, with self-supervised (SSL) models providing more reliable representations. While Gaussian noise effectively detects general objects, it performs worse on facial images, whereas Gaussian blur is more effective due to potential frequency artifacts. To further improve detection, we introduce Contrastive Blur, which enhances performance on facial images, and MINDER (MINimum distance DetEctoR), which addresses noise type bias, balancing performance across domains. Beyond performance gains, our work offers valuable insights for both the generative and detection communities, contributing to a deeper understanding of model robustness property utilized for deepfake detection.

Visual Counter Turing Test (VCT^2): Discovering the Challenges for AI-Generated Image Detection and Introducing Visual AI Index (V_AI)

The proliferation of AI techniques for image generation, coupled with their increasing accessibility, has raised significant concerns about the potential misuse of these images to spread misinformation. Recent AI-generated image detection (AGID) methods include CNNDetection, NPR, DM Image Detection, Fake Image Detection, DIRE, LASTED, GAN Image Detection, AIDE, SSP, DRCT, RINE, OCC-CLIP, De-Fake, and Deep Fake Detection. However, we argue that the current state-of-the-art AGID techniques are inadequate for effectively detecting contemporary AI-generated images and advocate for a comprehensive reevaluation of these methods. We introduce the Visual Counter Turing Test (VCT^2), a benchmark comprising ~130K images generated by contemporary text-to-image models (Stable Diffusion 2.1, Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Diffusion 3, DALL-E 3, and Midjourney 6). VCT^2 includes two sets of prompts sourced from tweets by the New York Times Twitter account and captions from the MS COCO dataset. We also evaluate the performance of the aforementioned AGID techniques on the VCT$^2$ benchmark, highlighting their ineffectiveness in detecting AI-generated images. As image-generative AI models continue to evolve, the need for a quantifiable framework to evaluate these models becomes increasingly critical. To meet this need, we propose the Visual AI Index (V_AI), which assesses generated images from various visual perspectives, including texture complexity and object coherence, setting a new standard for evaluating image-generative AI models. To foster research in this domain, we make our https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous1233/COCO_AI and https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous1233/twitter_AI datasets publicly available.

Anatomically-Grounded Fact Checking of Automated Chest X-ray Reports

With the emergence of large-scale vision-language models, realistic radiology reports may be generated using only medical images as input guided by simple prompts. However, their practical utility has been limited due to the factual errors in their description of findings. In this paper, we propose a novel model for explainable fact-checking that identifies errors in findings and their locations indicated through the reports. Specifically, we analyze the types of errors made by automated reporting methods and derive a new synthetic dataset of images paired with real and fake descriptions of findings and their locations from a ground truth dataset. A new multi-label cross-modal contrastive regression network is then trained on this datsaset. We evaluate the resulting fact-checking model and its utility in correcting reports generated by several SOTA automated reporting tools on a variety of benchmark datasets with results pointing to over 40\% improvement in report quality through such error detection and correction.