# Explainable Artifacts for Synthetic Western Blot Source Attribution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18881 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18881/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Are GAN generated images easy to detect? A critical analysis of the state-of-the-art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02617/) (2021)
- [Detecting GAN generated Fake Images using Co-occurrence Matrices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06836/) (2019)
- [CNN Detection of GAN-Generated Face Images based on Cross-Band Co-occurrences Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12909/) (2020)
- [The Age of Synthetic Realities: Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11503/) (2023)
- [Forensic Analysis of Synthetically Generated Western Blot Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08739/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [GAN-Blot: A Controllable Structure-Style Synthesis Benchmark for Western Blot Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06619/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have enabled generative models to produce synthetic scientific images that are indistinguishable from pristine ones, posing a challenge even for expert scientists habituated to working with such content. When exploited by organizations known as paper mills, which systematically generate fraudulent articles, these technologies can significantly contribute to the spread of misinformation about ungrounded science, potentially undermining trust in scientific research. While previous studies have explored black-box solutions, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, for identifying synthetic content, only some have addressed the challenge of generalizing across different models and providing insight into the artifacts in synthetic images that inform the detection process. This study aims to identify explainable artifacts generated by state-of-the-art generative models (e.g., Generative Adversarial Networks and Diffusion Models) and leverage them for open-set identification and source attribution (i.e., pointing to the model that created the image).