# LDR-Net: A Novel Framework for AI-generated Image Detection via Localized Discrepancy Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13475 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13475/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [Detecting Deepfakes with Self-Blended Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08376/) (2022)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [What makes fake images detectable? Understanding properties that generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10588/) (2020)
- [Global Texture Enhancement for Fake Face Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00133/) (2020)
- [DE-FAKE: Detection and Attribution of Fake Images Generated by Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06998/) (2022)
- [Multi-task Learning For Detecting and Segmenting Manipulated Facial Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06876/) (2019)
- [FrePGAN: Robust Deepfake Detection Using Frequency-level Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03347/) (2022)
- [BiHPF: Bilateral High-Pass Filters for Robust Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00911/) (2021)
- [Exposing the Deception: Uncovering More Forgery Clues for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01786/) (2024)
- [Detecting GAN-generated Images by Orthogonal Training of Multiple CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02246/) (2022)
- [DistilDIRE: A Small, Fast, Cheap and Lightweight Diffusion Synthesized Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00856/) (2024)
- [Grimm in Wonderland: Prompt Engineering with Midjourney to Illustrate Fairytales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08961/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid advancement of generative models, the visual quality of generated images has become nearly indistinguishable from the real ones, posing challenges to content authenticity verification. Existing methods for detecting AI-generated images primarily focus on specific forgery clues, which are often tailored to particular generative models like GANs or diffusion models. These approaches struggle to generalize across architectures. Building on the observation that generative images often exhibit local anomalies, such as excessive smoothness, blurred textures, and unnatural pixel variations in small regions, we propose the localized discrepancy representation network (LDR-Net), a novel approach for detecting AI-generated images. LDR-Net captures smoothing artifacts and texture irregularities, which are common but often overlooked. It integrates two complementary modules: local gradient autocorrelation (LGA) which models local smoothing anomalies to detect smoothing anomalies, and local variation pattern (LVP) which captures unnatural regularities by modeling the complexity of image patterns. By merging LGA and LVP features, a comprehensive representation of localized discrepancies can be provided. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LDR-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance in detecting generated images and exhibits satisfactory generalization across unseen generative models. The code will be released upon acceptance of this paper.