# Multimodal Conditional Information Bottleneck for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15217 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15217/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [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)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [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)
- [StyleGAN-XL: Scaling StyleGAN to Large Diverse Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00273/) (2022)
- [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)
- [DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14896/) (2022)
- [GenImage: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08571/) (2023)
- [Emergence of Invariance and Disentanglement in Deep Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01350/) (2017)
- [Interpreting CLIP's Image Representation via Text-Based Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05916/) (2023)
- [A Sanity Check for AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19435/) (2024)
- [Forgery-aware Adaptive Transformer for Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16649/) (2023)
- [DE-FAKE: Detection and Attribution of Fake Images Generated by Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06998/) (2022)
- [Raising the Bar of AI-generated Image Detection with CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00195/) (2023)
- [Training generative neural networks via Maximum Mean Discrepancy optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.03906/) (2015)

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

- [IncreFA: Breaking the Static Wall of Generative Model Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17736/) (2026)
- [The Describe-Then-Generate Bottleneck: How VLM Descriptions Alter Image Generation Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18179/) (2025)
- [VGIF-Score: Interpretable and Diagnostic Evaluation of Spatio-Temporal Instruction Following in Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13527/) (2026)
- [CoDA: Color Distribution Probing for Efficient and Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24306/) (2026)
- [FlexiGrad: Adaptive Gradient Modulation for Hierarchical Fine-Grained Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17563/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although existing CLIP-based methods for detecting AI-generated images have achieved promising results, they are still limited by severe feature redundancy, which hinders their generalization ability. To address this issue, incorporating an information bottleneck network into the task presents a straightforward solution. However, relying solely on image-corresponding prompts results in suboptimal performance due to the inherent diversity of prompts. In this paper, we propose a multimodal conditional bottleneck network to reduce feature redundancy while enhancing the discriminative power of features extracted by CLIP, thereby improving the model's generalization ability. We begin with a semantic analysis experiment, where we observe that arbitrary text features exhibit lower cosine similarity with real image features than with fake image features in the CLIP feature space, a phenomenon we refer to as "bias". Therefore, we introduce InfoFD, a text-guided AI-generated image detection framework. InfoFD consists of two key components: the Text-Guided Conditional Information Bottleneck (TGCIB) and Dynamic Text Orthogonalization (DTO). TGCIB improves the generalizability of learned representations by conditioning on both text and class modalities. DTO dynamically updates weighted text features, preserving semantic information while leveraging the global "bias". Our model achieves exceptional generalization performance on the GenImage dataset and latest generative models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ant0ny44/InfoFD.