# Noise-Informed Diffusion-Generated Image Detection with Anomaly Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16743 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16743/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 60 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2025.

## 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 60)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [Pseudo Numerical Methods for Diffusion Models on Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09778/) (2022)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors that Generalize Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10174/) (2023)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Reduce the Artifacts Bias for More Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14486/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Hierarchical Image-Text Misalignment for Universal Fake Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00427/) (2025)
- [Findings of the Counter Turing Test: AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20787/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid development of image generation technologies, especially the advancement of Diffusion Models, the quality of synthesized images has significantly improved, raising concerns among researchers about information security. To mitigate the malicious abuse of diffusion models, diffusion-generated image detection has proven to be an effective countermeasure.However, a key challenge for forgery detection is generalising to diffusion models not seen during training. In this paper, we address this problem by focusing on image noise. We observe that images from different diffusion models share similar noise patterns, distinct from genuine images. Building upon this insight, we introduce a novel Noise-Aware Self-Attention (NASA) module that focuses on noise regions to capture anomalous patterns. To implement a SOTA detection model, we incorporate NASA into Swin Transformer, forming an novel detection architecture NASA-Swin. Additionally, we employ a cross-modality fusion embedding to combine RGB and noise images, along with a channel mask strategy to enhance feature learning from both modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing detection capabilities for diffusion-generated images. When encountering unseen generation methods, our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance.Our code is available at https://github.com/WeinanGuan/NASA-Swin.
