Fragile Reconstruction: Adversarial Vulnerability of Reconstruction-Based Detectors for Diffusion-Generated Images

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12781v1
• Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:17:51 GMT
• Title: Fragile Reconstruction: Adversarial Vulnerability of Reconstruction-Based Detectors for Diffusion-Generated Images
• Abstract summary: We present a systematic evaluation of the adversarial robustness of three representative detectors across four diverse generative backbone models.<n>We construct adversarial attacks in white-box scenarios, which degrade the performance of all well-trained detectors.<n>We also find that attacks crafted against one detector can be transferred to others, indicating that adversarial attacks on detectors can also be constructed in a black-box setting.
• Score: 32.470971087318695
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Recently, detecting AI-generated images produced by diffusion-based models has attracted increasing attention due to their potential threat to safety. Among existing approaches, reconstruction-based methods have emerged as a prominent paradigm for this task. However, we find that such methods exhibit severe security vulnerabilities to adversarial perturbations; that is, by adding imperceptible adversarial perturbations to input images, the detection accuracy of classifiers collapses to near zero. To verify this threat, we present a systematic evaluation of the adversarial robustness of three representative detectors across four diverse generative backbone models. First, we construct adversarial attacks in white-box scenarios, which degrade the performance of all well-trained detectors. Moreover, we find that these attacks demonstrate transferability; specifically, attacks crafted against one detector can be transferred to others, indicating that adversarial attacks on detectors can also be constructed in a black-box setting. Finally, we assess common countermeasures and find that standard defense methods against adversarial attacks provide limited mitigation. We attribute these failures to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of attacked samples as perceived by the detectors. Overall, our results reveal fundamental security limitations of reconstruction-based detectors and highlight the need to rethink existing detection strategies.

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