# LAID: Lightweight AI-Generated Image Detection in Spatial and Spectral Domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05162/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (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)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [HiDDeN: Hiding Data With Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09937/) (2018)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [StegaStamp: Invisible Hyperlinks in Physical Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05343/) (2019)
- [EfficientFormer: Vision Transformers at MobileNet Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01191/) (2022)
- [Co-Scale Conv-Attentional Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06399/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent proliferation of photorealistic AI-generated images (AIGI) has raised urgent concerns about their potential misuse, particularly on social media platforms. Current state-of-the-art AIGI detection methods typically rely on large, deep neural architectures, creating significant computational barriers to real-time, large-scale deployment on platforms like social media. To challenge this reliance on computationally intensive models, we introduce LAID, the first framework -- to our knowledge -- that benchmarks and evaluates the detection performance and efficiency of off-the-shelf lightweight neural networks. In this framework, we comprehensively train and evaluate selected models on a representative subset of the GenImage dataset across spatial, spectral, and fusion image domains. Our results demonstrate that lightweight models can achieve competitive accuracy, even under adversarial conditions, while incurring substantially lower memory and computation costs compared to current state-of-the-art methods. This study offers valuable insight into the trade-off between efficiency and performance in AIGI detection and lays a foundation for the development of practical, scalable, and trustworthy detection systems. The source code of LAID can be found at: https://github.com/nchivar/LAID.