# Open Set Synthetic Image Source Attribution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11557/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [Detecting and Simulating Artifacts in GAN Fake Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06515/) (2019)
- [Media Forensics and DeepFakes: an overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06564/) (2020)
- [Projected GANs Converge Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01007/) (2021)
- [Deep Bilateral Learning for Real-Time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02880/) (2017)
- [Neural Rays for Occlusion-aware Image-based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13421/) (2021)
- [Are GAN generated images easy to detect? A critical analysis of the state-of-the-art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02617/) (2021)
- [Fighting Fake News: Image Splice Detection via Learned Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04096/) (2018)
- [Noiseprint: a CNN-based camera model fingerprint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08396/) (2018)
- [ProxyNCA++: Revisiting and Revitalizing Proxy Neighborhood Component Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01113/) (2020)
- [Towards Discovery and Attribution of Open-world GAN Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04580/) (2021)
- [RepMix: Representation Mixing for Robust Attribution of Synthesized Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02063/) (2022)
- [Forensic Similarity for Digital Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04684/) (2019)
- [Source Generator Attribution via Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02259/) (2019)
- [Exposing Fake Images with Forensic Similarity Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02861/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Beyond Deepfake Images: Detecting AI-Generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15955/) (2024)
- [Synthetic Image Verification in the Era of Generative AI: What Works and What Isn't There Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00196/) (2024)
- [Forensic Self-Descriptions Are All You Need for Zero-Shot Detection, Open-Set Source Attribution, and Clustering of AI-generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21003/) (2025)
- [TrueFake: A Real World Case Dataset of Last Generation Fake Images also Shared on Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20658/) (2025)
- [E3: Ensemble of Expert Embedders for Adapting Synthetic Image Detectors to New Generators Using Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08814/) (2024)
- [BOSC: A Backdoor-based Framework for Open Set Synthetic Image Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11491/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot Synthetic Image Attribution: Identifying Unseen Generators with Limited Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25682/) (2025)
- [SAGA: Source Attribution of Generative AI Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12834/) (2025)
- [Autonomous and Self-Adapting System for Synthetic Media Detection and Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03615/) (2025)
- [Proto-LeakNet: Towards Signal-Leak Aware Attribution in Synthetic Human Face Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04260/) (2025)
- [Scalable Black-Box Model Attribution for Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15652/) (2026)
- [Forensic Twins: Self-Supervised Residual Learning for AI-Generated Image Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31514/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI-generated images have become increasingly realistic and have garnered significant public attention. While synthetic images are intriguing due to their realism, they also pose an important misinformation threat. To address this new threat, researchers have developed multiple algorithms to detect synthetic images and identify their source generators. However, most existing source attribution techniques are designed to operate in a closed-set scenario, i.e. they can only be used to discriminate between known image generators. By contrast, new image-generation techniques are rapidly emerging. To contend with this, there is a great need for open-set source attribution techniques that can identify when synthetic images have originated from new, unseen generators. To address this problem, we propose a new metric learning-based approach. Our technique works by learning transferrable embeddings capable of discriminating between generators, even when they are not seen during training. An image is first assigned to a candidate generator, then is accepted or rejected based on its distance in the embedding space from known generators' learned reference points. Importantly, we identify that initializing our source attribution embedding network by pretraining it on image camera identification can improve our embeddings' transferability. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate our approach's ability to attribute the source of synthetic images in open-set scenarios.