Papers for

digital media forensics teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Ensemble method improves model identification for synthetic images

A Multi-View and Confusion-Guided Ensemble Framework for Robust Synthetic Image Attribution

Abstract: Synthetic image attribution (SIA) has become increasingly important with the rapid advancement of text-to-image generation models. However, accurately identifying the source model of a generated image remains challenging due to the growing similarity among modern diffusion-based generators and the presence of diverse post-processing operations. In this report, we present a multi-view and confusion-guided ensemble framework for the Synthetic Image Attribution Challenge of the DLMMDD Workshop at ICANN 2026. Our approach integrates multiple complementary architectures, including FFT-ConvNeXt, DINOv2, CLIP, and Xception, to capture diverse attribution cues from frequency, semantic, and forensic perspectives. To improve robustness against unknown degradations and image manipulations, extensive data augmentation strategies are employed during training, simulating realistic post-processing operations such as compression, resizing, grayscale conversion, and blur. Furthermore, we analyze the confusion patterns of the ensemble model and observe severe ambiguity between Stable Diffusion 3 and Stable Diffusion 3.5. To address this issue, we introduce a dedicated binary expert classifier that is selectively activated under low-confidence conditions. We additionally apply class-adaptive confidence calibration to improve the discrimination of challenging classes such as Tencent Hunyuan. The proposed framework achieved 99.53% on the public leaderboard and 99.20% on the private leaderboard. The source code and implementation details are publicly available at https://github.com/ZOMIN28/SIA.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Identifying which AI model created a synthetic image is hard because many modern image generators produce very similar images and these images can be edited afterward. The authors combined several different techniques that look at images in multiple ways, such as their frequency patterns and semantic content, to catch unique clues. They also trained their system to handle common changes like resizing or blurring. When their system was unsure, it used a special focused classifier to tell closely related image models apart. This approach worked really well in a competition, achieving over 99% accuracy.
Open 2609.11188v1