# Are handcrafted filters helpful for attributing AI-generated images?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14570 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14570/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [GenImage: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08571/) (2023)
- [Global Texture Enhancement for Fake Face Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00133/) (2020)
- [Do GANs leave artificial fingerprints?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11842/) (2018)
- [DE-FAKE: Detection and Attribution of Fake Images Generated by Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06998/) (2022)
- [Reducing Network Agnostophobia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04110/) (2018)
- [FrePGAN: Robust Deepfake Detection Using Frequency-level Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03347/) (2022)
- [Towards Discovery and Attribution of Open-world GAN Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04580/) (2021)
- [BiHPF: Bilateral High-Pass Filters for Robust Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00911/) (2021)
- [Deepfake Network Architecture Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13843/) (2022)
- [RepMix: Representation Mixing for Robust Attribution of Synthesized Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02063/) (2022)
- [Progressive Open Space Expansion for Open-Set Model Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06877/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Pseudo Learning for Open-World DeepFake Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11132/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Learning Counterfactually Decoupled Attention for Open-World Model Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23074/) (2025)
- [Attribution as Retrieval: Model-Agnostic AI-Generated Image Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10583/) (2026)
- [ImageAttributionBench: How Far Are We from Generalizable Attribution?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12967/) (2026)
- [VERITAS: Verification and Explanation of Realness in Images for Transparency in AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05146/) (2025)
- [PRISM: Phase-enhanced Radial-based Image Signature Mapping framework for fingerprinting AI-generated images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15270/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, a vast number of image generation models have been proposed, which raises concerns regarding the misuse of these artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for generating fake images. To attribute the AI-generated images, existing schemes usually design and train deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn the model fingerprints, which usually requires a large amount of data for effective learning. In this paper, we aim to answer the following two questions for AI-generated image attribution, 1) is it possible to design useful handcrafted filters to facilitate the fingerprint learning? and 2) how we could reduce the amount of training data after we incorporate the handcrafted filters? We first propose a set of Multi-Directional High-Pass Filters (MHFs) which are capable to extract the subtle fingerprints from various directions. Then, we propose a Directional Enhanced Feature Learning network (DEFL) to take both the MHFs and randomly-initialized filters into consideration. The output of the DEFL is fused with the semantic features to produce a compact fingerprint. To make the compact fingerprint discriminative among different models, we propose a Dual-Margin Contrastive (DMC) loss to tune our DEFL. Finally, we propose a reference based fingerprint classification scheme for image attribution. Experimental results demonstrate that it is indeed helpful to use our MHFs for attributing the AI-generated images. The performance of our proposed method is significantly better than the state-of-the-art for both the closed-set and open-set image attribution, where only a small amount of images are required for training.