Manni Cui

Manni Cui, Ruiqi Liu, Dianyuan Zou et al.

AI-generated image (AIGI) detectors achieve strong accuracy on clean benchmarks, but their performance drops sharply after images are propagated through real-world channels. We trace this fragility to what these detectors actually learn: they overfit to local artifacts left by generators in small spatial neighborhoods, which are easily destroyed by common propagation degradations such as JPEG compression and blur. Instead, we shift the discriminative cue from fragile local artifacts to more robust global structure. Building on this, we propose GlobalForge, a framework with two complementary modules. The Local Information Bottleneck (LIB) suppresses local components to block shortcut learning, while the Global Structural Reasoning (GSR) module forces every token to gather evidence from distant regions. Both modules are trained jointly under a contrastive structural loss based on degradation that keeps the resulting features stable under degradation. To support fine-grained robustness evaluation, we further introduce RealDeg-Bench, covering 7 common degradation operators and multi-step compound chains. GlobalForge improves average BAcc on 8 in-the-wild benchmark groups by $\mathbf{5.89\%}$ over the previous state-of-the-art, and is clearly ahead of representative baselines on RealDeg-Bench under both single and compound degradations. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GlobalForge-BE0F/.

Manni Cui, Ziheng Qin, ZiAn Wang et al.

AI-generated videos (AIGVs) typically contain subtle temporal artifacts that arise from inter-frame inconsistencies rather than within individual frames. A detector that captures such artifacts should therefore benefit from video pretrained backbones over image only ones. In practice, however, video backbones with standard global readouts often fail to outperform strong image pretrained probes on AIGV benchmarks. We attribute this gap to excessive spatiotemporal aggregation in the readout. Video pretrained backbones tend to compress each frame into a single global descriptor. This compression suppresses local patch level temporal dynamics and discards inter patch relations, which are precisely the cues that AIGV detection most reliably depends on. Based on this, we propose Velocity Gated Patch Velocity Profiling (V-PVP), a lightweight readout that replaces only the aggregation layer with two parallel streams over the patch velocity field, adding only about $0.5$M trainable parameters. V-PVP serves as a general plug-and-play module that consistently improves performance across diverse video backbones under both end-to-end fine-tuning and linear probing settings. Our method reaches \textbf{95.28} AUC on AIGVDBench while keeping the backbone fully frozen. The results show that simply replacing the aggregation layer reactivates the temporal potential of frozen video backbones, restoring their advantage on AIGV detection. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PVP-81B3/.

Ruiqi Liu, Manni Cui, Ziheng Qin et al.

High-fidelity generative models have narrowed the perceptual gap between synthetic and real images, posing serious threats to media security. Most existing AI-generated image (AIGI) detectors rely on artifact-based classification and struggle to generalize to evolving generative traces. In contrast, human judgment relies on stable real-world regularities, with deviations from the human cognitive manifold serving as a more generalizable signal of forgery. Motivated by this insight, we reformulate AIGI detection as a Reference-Comparison problem that verifies consistency with the real-image manifold rather than fitting specific forgery cues. We propose MIRROR (Manifold Ideal Reference ReconstructOR), a framework that explicitly encodes reality priors using a learnable discrete memory bank. MIRROR projects an input into a manifold-consistent ideal reference via sparse linear combination, and uses the resulting residuals as robust detection signals. To evaluate whether detectors reach the "superhuman crossover" required to replace human experts, we introduce the Human-AIGI benchmark, featuring a psychophysically curated human-imperceptible subset. Across 14 benchmarks, MIRROR consistently outperforms prior methods, achieving gains of 2.1% on six standard benchmarks and 8.1% on seven in-the-wild benchmarks. On Human-AIGI, MIRROR reaches 89.6% accuracy across 27 generators, surpassing both lay users and visual experts, and further approaching the human perceptual limit as pretrained backbones scale. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/349793927/MIRROR