# Mirage: Unveiling Hidden Artifacts in Synthetic Images with Large Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03840 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03840/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 22 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-jailbreaks-and-adversarial-robustness/)

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [NVAE: A Deep Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03898/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [JourneyDB: A Benchmark for Generative Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00716/) (2023)
- [A Sanity Check for AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19435/) (2024)
- [AEROBLADE: Training-Free Detection of Latent Diffusion Images Using Autoencoder Reconstruction Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17879/) (2024)
- [Towards the Detection of Diffusion Model Deepfakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14571/) (2022)
- [Fusing Global and Local Features for Generalized AI-Synthesized Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13964/) (2022)
- [CIFAKE: Image Classification and Explainable Identification of AI-Generated Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14126/) (2023)
- [Seeing is not always believing: Benchmarking Human and Model Perception of AI-Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13023/) (2023)
- [Any-Resolution AI-Generated Image Detection by Spectral Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19417/) (2024)
- [ArtiFact: A Large-Scale Dataset with Artificial and Factual Images for Generalizable and Robust Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11970/) (2023)
- [WildFake: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for AI-Generated Images Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11843/) (2024)
- [Contrasting Deepfakes Diffusion via Contrastive Learning and Global-Local Similarities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20337/) (2024)
- [Disguised Copyright Infringement of Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06737/) (2024)
- [Generative manufacturing systems using diffusion models and ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00958/) (2024)

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

- [Evidence-based Decision Modeling for Synthetic Face Detection with Uncertainty-driven Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09935/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in image generation models have led to models that produce synthetic images that are increasingly difficult for standard AI detectors to identify, even though they often remain distinguishable by humans. To identify this discrepancy, we introduce Mirage, a curated dataset comprising a diverse range of AI-generated images exhibiting visible artifacts, where current state-of-the-art detection methods largely fail. Furthermore, we investigate whether Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which are increasingly employed as substitutes for human judgment in various tasks, can be leveraged for explainable AI image detection. Our experiments on both Mirage and existing benchmark datasets demonstrate that while LVLMs are highly effective at detecting AI-generated images with visible artifacts, their performance declines when confronted with images lacking such cues.