# TRACE: Trajectory Representation and Consistency Estimation for AI-Generated Video Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25775 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25775/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [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)
- [VideoScore: Building Automatic Metrics to Simulate Fine-grained Human Feedback for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15252/) (2024)
- [DeMamba: AI-Generated Video Detection on Million-Scale GenVideo Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19707/) (2024)
- [Video Diffusion Models are Training-free Motion Interpreter and Controller](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14864/) (2024)
- [Dual Data Alignment Makes AI-Generated Image Detector Easier Generalizable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14359/) (2025)
- [D3: Scaling Up Deepfake Detection by Learning from Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04584/) (2024)
- [AI-Generated Video Detection via Perceptual Straightening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00583/) (2025)
- [D3: Training-Free AI-Generated Video Detection Using Second-Order Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00701/) (2025)
- [Physics-Driven Spatiotemporal Modeling for AI-Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08073/) (2025)
- [Detecting AI-Generated Video via Frame Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02085/) (2024)
- [Skyra: AI-Generated Video Detection via Grounded Artifact Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15693/) (2025)
- [Seeing What Matters: Generalizable AI-generated Video Detection with Forensic-Oriented Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16802/) (2025)
- [Veritas: Generalizable Deepfake Detection via Pattern-Aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21048/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Noise Feature: Accurate and Fast Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02625/) (2023)
- [Turns Out I'm Not Real: Towards Robust Detection of AI-Generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09601/) (2024)
- [Your One-Stop Solution for AI-Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11035/) (2026)
- [Training-free Detection of Generated Videos via Spatial-Temporal Likelihoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15026/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in generative video models have enabled the synthesis of visually realistic content, posing significant challenges to synthetic video detection. Existing detectors often rely on appearance artifacts, semantic inconsistencies, and temporal patterns that may be generator-specific, limitating generalization to unseen synthesis models. We investigate whether responses to a pretrained generative model provide more transferable forensic cues. Our key observation is that real and AI-generated videos exhibit distinct velocity responses under a pretrained Flow Matching video model. This distinction persists when different pretrained video-generation backbones are used as probes, suggesting that velocity responses offer transferable forensic signals beyond visual artificts. Motivated by this observation, we propose TRACE (emphunderlineTrajectory underlineRepresentation underlineand underlineConsistency underlineEstimation), a generation-process-aware framework for AI-generated video detection. TRACE leverages a pretrained video DiT as a velocity-field probe to extract representations at multiple flow time points, and models cross-frame consistency through velocity differences between adjacent frames. We further introduce a Real-Centered Trajectory Optimization objective that encourages generator-invariant representation learning. Extensive experiments on AIGVDBench demonstrate that TRACE generalizes effectively across diverse generators, substantially outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods on unseen open- and closed-source video generation models.