Reduce the Artifacts Bias for More Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection

Abstract

As the misuse of AI-generated images grows, generalizable image detection techniques are urgently needed. Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods adopt aligned training datasets to reduce content, size, and format biases, empowering models to capture robust forgery cues. A common strategy employs reconstruction techniques, e.g., VAE and DDIM, to construct aligned synthetic negatives. However, relying on a single reconstruction process yields a narrow and homogeneous artifact distribution, leaving forensic traces from other artifact-forming mechanisms underrepresented. To broaden artifact coverage without sacrificing alignment, we construct adversarial restoration-based negatives with SRGAN, whose learned upsampling and texture restoration yield traces complementary to VAE reconstruction while preserving content, size, and format. Directly mixing the two aligned fake domains is nontrivial because their artifact manifolds and optimization directions can conflict. We therefore propose Artifact-Complementary Expert Fusion (ACEF), a two-stage framework for robust AIGC detection. ACEF first constructs two artifact-specific experts via LoRA adaptation on a frozen foundation backbone. It then freezes them and introduces Layer-wise Artifact-Complementary Fusion (LACF) to integrate multi-layer source-specific and cross-artifact evidence through an adaptive gate. Extensive experiments on 13 diverse benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.