# LOTA: Bit-Planes Guided AI-Generated Image Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14230 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14230/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 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 31 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 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 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Detecting and Simulating Artifacts in GAN Fake Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06515/) (2019)
- [On the detection of synthetic images generated by diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00680/) (2022)
- [Global Texture Enhancement for Fake Face Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00133/) (2020)
- [Fourier Spectrum Discrepancies in Deep Network Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06465/) (2019)
- [Intriguing properties of synthetic images: from generative adversarial networks to diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06408/) (2023)
- [PatchCraft: Exploring Texture Patch for Efficient AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12397/) (2023)
- [Towards the Detection of Diffusion Model Deepfakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14571/) (2022)
- [A Closer Look at Fourier Spectrum Discrepancies for CNN-generated Images Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17195/) (2021)
- [Shadows Don't Lie and Lines Can't Bend! Generative Models don't know Projective Geometry...for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17138/) (2023)
- [Countering Malicious DeepFakes: Survey, Battleground, and Horizon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00218/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Detection of AI-Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15875/) (2024)
- [Exposing the Fake: Effective Diffusion-Generated Images Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06272/) (2023)
- [LaRE2: Latent Reconstruction Error Based Method for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17465/) (2024)
- [A Single Simple Patch is All You Need for AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01123/) (2024)
- [Faster Than Lies: Real-time Deepfake Detection using Binary Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04932/) (2024)
- [GLFF: Global and Local Feature Fusion for AI-synthesized Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08615/) (2022)
- [Frequency Masking for Universal Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06506/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [How well are open sourced AI-generated image detection models out-of-the-box: A comprehensive benchmark study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07814/) (2026)
- [Attribution as Retrieval: Model-Agnostic AI-Generated Image Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10583/) (2026)
- [SSAFE: Simple and Strong AI-Generated Image Detection via Frozen Vision Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08634/) (2026)
- [DailyBench: A Unified Benchmark for AI-Generated and Manipulated Images from Modern Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24016/) (2026)
- [Revealing Artifacts via Noise Amplification: A Novel Perspective for AI-Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16742/) (2026)
- [Micro-Defects Expose Macro-Fakes: Detecting AI-Generated Images via Local Distributional Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09296/) (2026)
- [FiSeR: Fine-Grained Source Representations for Cross-Domain AI Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00606/) (2026)
- [Retrieval-Driven Training-Free AI-Generated Video Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28955/) (2026)
- [RAID: Towards Robust AI-Generated Image Detection with Bit-Reversed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28974/) (2026)
- [RED: Reconstruction Evolution Dynamics for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36822/) (2026)
- [COMPASS: Contextual Moment Prior Alignment for Generalizable AIGI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18034/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid advancement of GAN and Diffusion models makes it more difficult to distinguish AI-generated images from real ones. Recent studies often use image-based reconstruction errors as an important feature for determining whether an image is AI-generated. However, these approaches typically incur high computational costs and also fail to capture intrinsic noisy features present in the raw images. To solve these problems, we innovatively refine error extraction by using bit-plane-based image processing, as lower bit planes indeed represent noise patterns in images. We introduce an effective bit-planes guided noisy image generation and exploit various image normalization strategies, including scaling and thresholding. Then, to amplify the noise signal for easier AI-generated image detection, we design a maximum gradient patch selection that applies multi-directional gradients to compute the noise score and selects the region with the highest score. Finally, we propose a lightweight and effective classification head and explore two different structures: noise-based classifier and noise-guided classifier. Extensive experiments on the GenImage benchmark demonstrate the outstanding performance of our method, which achieves an average accuracy of 98.9% (11.9%~uparrow) and shows excellent cross-generator generalization capability. Particularly, our method achieves an accuracy of over 98.2% from GAN to Diffusion and over 99.2% from Diffusion to GAN. Moreover, it performs error extraction at the millisecond level, nearly a hundred times faster than existing methods. The code is at https://github.com/hongsong-wang/LOTA.