# MIRROR: Manifold Ideal Reference ReconstructOR for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02222 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02222/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

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

- [EvoGuard: An Extensible Agentic RL-based Framework for Practical and Evolving AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17343/) (2026)
- [Deep Residual Injection for Full-Spectrum Forensic Signal Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15880/) (2026)
- [Rethinking the Readout: Unlocking Video Backbones for AI-Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15321/) (2026)
- [Veritas++: Value-aware On-Policy Distillation for Perception-Enhanced AIGI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27113/) (2026)
- [HEDGE: Heterogeneous Ensemble for Detection of AI-GEnerated Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03555/) (2026)
- [LOGER: Local--Global Ensemble for Robust Deepfake Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03558/) (2026)
- [Video as Natural Augmentation: Towards Unified AI-Generated Image and Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21977/) (2026)
- [Learning Continuous Source Responses For Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14316/) (2026)
- [Beyond Natural Images: Rethinking AI-Generated Image Detection in Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14352/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking Neural Defend ARCAS 1B: A Foundational Multimodal Deepfake Detection Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25154/) (2026)
- [EviScene: Beyond "Is It AI?" for Agentic Image Factuality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14609/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-fidelity generative models have narrowed the perceptual gap between synthetic and real images, posing serious threats to media security. Most existing AI-generated image (AIGI) detectors rely on artifact-based classification and struggle to generalize to evolving generative traces. In contrast, human judgment relies on stable real-world regularities, with deviations from the human cognitive manifold serving as a more generalizable signal of forgery. Motivated by this insight, we reformulate AIGI detection as a Reference-Comparison problem that verifies consistency with the real-image manifold rather than fitting specific forgery cues. We propose MIRROR (Manifold Ideal Reference ReconstructOR), a framework that explicitly encodes reality priors using a learnable discrete memory bank. MIRROR projects an input into a manifold-consistent ideal reference via sparse linear combination, and uses the resulting residuals as robust detection signals. To evaluate whether detectors reach the "superhuman crossover" required to replace human experts, we introduce the Human-AIGI benchmark, featuring a psychophysically curated human-imperceptible subset. Across 14 benchmarks, MIRROR consistently outperforms prior methods, achieving gains of 2.1% on six standard benchmarks and 8.1% on seven in-the-wild benchmarks. On Human-AIGI, MIRROR reaches 89.6% accuracy across 27 generators, surpassing both lay users and visual experts, and further approaching the human perceptual limit as pretrained backbones scale. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/349793927/MIRROR