defense arXiv Oct 31, 2025 · Oct 2025
Simone Bonechi, Paolo Andreini, Barbara Toniella Corradini · University of Siena · Italian Institute of Technology
Leverages diffusion model internal activations to detect deepfakes and attribute source generators without fine-tuning
Output Integrity Attack visiongenerative
The rapid progress of generative diffusion models has enabled the creation of synthetic images that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from real ones, raising concerns about authenticity, copyright, and misinformation. Existing supervised detectors often struggle to generalize across unseen generators, requiring extensive labeled data and frequent retraining. We introduce FRIDA (Fake-image Recognition and source Identification via Diffusion-features Analysis), a lightweight framework that leverages internal activations from a pre-trained diffusion model for deepfake detection and source generator attribution. A k-nearest-neighbor classifier applied to diffusion features achieves state-of-the-art cross-generator performance without fine-tuning, while a compact neural model enables accurate source attribution. These results show that diffusion representations inherently encode generator-specific patterns, providing a simple and interpretable foundation for synthetic image forensics.
diffusion traditional_ml University of Siena · Italian Institute of Technology