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arXiv · 2608.26648

Hierarchical Channel Stacking: A Structured Decision Framework for AI-Generated Image Detection

Saifullah Shoaib·Akash Borigi·Rupendra Lekkala·Amaury Lendasse·Edward Ratner·Sai Sowjanya Bhamidipati·Alexander Schlager·Peggy Lindner
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Abstract

Many synthetic-image detectors produce accurate predictions but offer limited insight into how those decisions are formed. This paper introduces Hierarchical Channel Stacking (HCS), a compact framework for AI-generated image detection that converts intermediate CNN activations into a structured 60-dimensional representation organized across three progressively deeper backbone stages. HCS uses per-channel Level-1 classifiers and a Level-2 aggregator to produce image-level predictions while preserving explicit hierarchical structure for analysis. On a benchmark spanning GAN and diffusion generators, HCS achieves 86.7% accuracy and 86.7% macro-F1 on the held-out test set. Stage ablation shows that the full three-stage system outperforms reduced single-stage and two-stage variants, indicating that the hierarchy carries complementary predictive information. Stage-level contribution analysis further shows that, in the analyzed detector setting, fake GAN and fake diffusion images exhibit distinct stage-level contribution profiles. These results position HCS not simply as a compact detector, but as a structured framework for studying how synthetic-image detectors assemble evidence across representation levels.

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Saifullah Shoaib, Akash Borigi, Rupendra Lekkala, Amaury Lendasse, Edward Ratner, Sai Sowjanya Bhamidipati, Alexander Schlager, Peggy Lindner. 2026-08-27. Hierarchical Channel Stacking: A Structured Decision Framework for AI-Generated Image Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26648

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