# Are CLIP features all you need for Universal Synthetic Image Origin Attribution?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09153 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09153/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 61 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [Solving Inverse Problems in Medical Imaging with Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08005/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors that Generalize Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10174/) (2023)
- [Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11132/) (2019)
- [ViM: Out-Of-Distribution with Virtual-logit Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10807/) (2022)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [On the Importance of Gradients for Detecting Distributional Shifts in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00218/) (2021)
- [GenImage: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08571/) (2023)
- [The Stable Signature: Rooting Watermarks in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15435/) (2023)
- [Detecting and Simulating Artifacts in GAN Fake Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06515/) (2019)
- [On the detection of synthetic images generated by diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00680/) (2022)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [Artificial Fingerprinting for Generative Models: Rooting Deepfake Attribution in Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08457/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Manifold Induced Biases for Zero-shot and Few-shot Detection of Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15470/) (2025)
- [Training-free Detection of Generated Videos via Spatial-Temporal Likelihoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15026/) (2026)
- [Few-Shot Synthetic Image Attribution: Identifying Unseen Generators with Limited Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25682/) (2025)
- [Training-free Source Attribution of AI-generated Images via Resynthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24278/) (2025)
- [Who Made This? Fake Detection and Source Attribution with Diffusion Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27602/) (2025)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning for Few-Shot AI-Generated Image Detection and Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16541/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Image Detection with CLIP: Understanding and Assessing Predictive Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12381/) (2026)
- [ImageAttributionBench: How Far Are We from Generalizable Attribution?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12967/) (2026)
- [Chroma Clues: Leveraging Color Statistics to Detect Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02224/) (2026)
- [Forged Calamity: Benchmark for Cross-Domain Synthetic Disaster Detection in the Age of Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18554/) (2026)
- [Face-Trace: Open-Set Attribution and Progressive Discovery of Synthetic Face Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07545/) (2026)
- [Representation and Reference Selection in Training-Free Synthetic Image Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12052/) (2026)
- [DNA: Dual-stage Native Attribution for Generated Image Source Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13685/) (2026)
- [Scalable Black-Box Model Attribution for Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15652/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The steady improvement of Diffusion Models for visual synthesis has given rise to many new and interesting use cases of synthetic images but also has raised concerns about their potential abuse, which poses significant societal threats. To address this, fake images need to be detected and attributed to their source model, and given the frequent release of new generators, realistic applications need to consider an Open-Set scenario where some models are unseen at training time. Existing forensic techniques are either limited to Closed-Set settings or to GAN-generated images, relying on fragile frequency-based "fingerprint" features. By contrast, we propose a simple yet effective framework that incorporates features from large pre-trained foundation models to perform Open-Set origin attribution of synthetic images produced by various generative models, including Diffusion Models. We show that our method leads to remarkable attribution performance, even in the low-data regime, exceeding the performance of existing methods and generalizes better on images obtained from a diverse set of architectures. We make the code publicly available at: https://github.com/ciodar/UniversalAttribution.