Flow of Truth: Proactive Temporal Forensics for Image-to-Video Generation
Yuzhuo Chen , Zehua Ma , Han Fang , Hengyi Wang , Guanjie Wang , Weiming Zhang
Published on arXiv
2604.15003
Output Integrity Attack
OWASP ML Top 10 — ML09
Key Finding
Substantially improves temporal forensics performance across 69,360 frames from 4 mainstream I2V models with 816 test videos
Flow of Truth
Novel technique introduced
The rapid rise of image-to-video (I2V) generation enables realistic videos to be created from a single image but also brings new forensic demands. Unlike static images, I2V content evolves over time, requiring forensics to move beyond 2D pixel-level tampering localization toward tracing how pixels flow and transform throughout the video. As frames progress, embedded traces drift and deform, making traditional spatial forensics ineffective. To address this unexplored dimension, we present **Flow of Truth**, the first proactive framework focusing on temporal forensics in I2V generation. A key challenge lies in discovering a forensic signature that can evolve consistently with the generation process, which is inherently a creative transformation rather than a deterministic reconstruction. Despite this intrinsic difficulty, we innovatively redefine video generation as *the motion of pixels through time rather than the synthesis of frames*. Building on this view, we propose a learnable forensic template that follows pixel motion and a template-guided flow module that decouples motion from image content, enabling robust temporal tracing. Experiments show that Flow of Truth generalizes across commercial and open-source I2V models, substantially improving temporal forensics performance.
Key Contributions
- First proactive temporal forensics framework for image-to-video generation that traces how pixels flow and transform throughout videos
- Learnable forensic template that follows pixel motion and template-guided flow module that decouples motion from content
- Generalizes across commercial (Kling2.1, Dreamina) and open-source (CogVideoX, Wan2.2) I2V models
🛡️ Threat Analysis
Paper focuses on output integrity and content provenance for AI-generated videos. The proposed 'Flow of Truth' framework embeds learnable forensic templates that trace pixel motion across frames to authenticate I2V-generated content. This is content watermarking/authentication for model outputs, not model ownership protection.