# GAN-Blot: A Controllable Structure-Style Synthesis Benchmark for Western Blot Forensics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06619 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06619/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Sep 2026.

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

- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors that Generalize Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10174/) (2023)
- [Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14881/) (2021)
- [DeepFakes and Beyond: A Survey of Face Manipulation and Fake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00179/) (2020)
- [Media Forensics and DeepFakes: an overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06564/) (2020)
- [Forgery-aware Adaptive Transformer for Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16649/) (2023)
- [DreamPose: Fashion Image-to-Video Synthesis via Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06025/) (2023)
- [Cross-domain Face Presentation Attack Detection via Multi-domain Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01959/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Representations from Intermediate Encoder-blocks for Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19091/) (2024)
- [Face Anti-Spoofing Via Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08250/) (2020)
- [The GAN is dead; long live the GAN! A Modern GAN Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05441/) (2025)
- [Efficient Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey from Principles to Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11795/) (2024)
- [GenDet: Towards Good Generalizations for AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08880/) (2023)
- [Deepfake Detection that Generalizes Across Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06248/) (2025)
- [Forensic Analysis of Synthetically Generated Western Blot Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08739/) (2021)
- [When Age-Invariant Face Recognition Meets Face Age Synthesis: A Multi-Task Learning Framework and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09835/) (2022)
- [Localization of Synthetic Manipulations in Western Blot Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13786/) (2024)
- [Forgery Blind Inspection for Detecting Manipulations of Gel Electrophoresis Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15086/) (2020)
- [Explainable Artifacts for Synthetic Western Blot Source Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18881/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Western blot (WB) images are widely used as key evidence in biomedical research. Recent scientific misconduct cases reveal that WB imagery is increasingly fabricated, making WB forensics a major concern for research integrity. However, while the progress of forensic detection techniques often relies on advances in forgery-generation techniques, the development of WB forensic techniques has been hindered by the lack of standardized appearance attribute definitions, image datasets, and controllable generation frameworks for WB imagery. To address this limitation, we present a controllable WB image synthesis framework, named GAN-Blot, for generating realistic synthetic WB images. We introduce a formulation that decomposes a WB image into a structure component and a style-reference component, enabling independent control over local protein-band geometry and the global visual appearance of a synthetic WB image. GAN-Blot integrates a dual-path autoencoding design with several style-alignment loss terms to enable implicit control over structure-style synthesis without predefined semantic appearance attributes. We further contribute a synthetic WB dataset containing more than 46K images and propose four evaluation protocols for controllable WB synthesis. Extensive experiments show that GAN-Blot can generate WB images with high fidelity in both protein-band structure and visual style. Under blind inspection, the generated images can fool domain experts and are not reliably distinguished from authentic WB images by existing detectors and screening platforms. These results demonstrate their utility as challenging controlled cases for validating and developing WB forensic methods.