# Layer Consistency Matters: Elegant Latent Transition Discrepancy for Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10598 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10598/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [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)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [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)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (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)
- [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)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [What makes fake images detectable? Understanding properties that generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10588/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DailyBench: A Unified Benchmark for AI-Generated and Manipulated Images from Modern Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24016/) (2026)
- [A Benchmark Dataset for MLLM-Generated Image Detection: GPT Image2 & Nano Banana2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01258/) (2026)
- [DECODE: Tackling Representation and Decision Degradation in Continual AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27882/) (2026)
- [Trustworthy synthetic visual media: Evidence across the media lifecycle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34232/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent rapid advancement of generative models has significantly improved the fidelity and accessibility of AI-generated synthetic images. While enabling various innovative applications, the unprecedented realism of these synthetics makes them increasingly indistinguishable from authentic photographs, posing serious security risks, such as media credibility and content manipulation. Although extensive efforts have been dedicated to detecting synthetic images, most existing approaches suffer from poor generalization to unseen data due to their reliance on model-specific artifacts or low-level statistical cues. In this work, we identify a previously unexplored distinction that real images maintain consistent semantic attention and structural coherence in their latent representations, exhibiting more stable feature transitions across network layers, whereas synthetic ones present discernible distinct patterns. Therefore, we propose a novel approach termed latent transition discrepancy (LTD), which captures the inter-layer consistency differences of real and synthetic images. LTD adaptively identifies the most discriminative layers and assesses the transition discrepancies across layers. Benefiting from the proposed inter-layer discriminative modeling, our approach exceeds the base model by 14.35% in mean Acc across three datasets containing diverse GANs and DMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LTD outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior detection accuracy, generalizability, and robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/yywencs/LTD