Enabling Supervised Learning of Generative Signatures for Generalized Synthetic Image Detection

Extracting reliable generative traces in generated images is critical for AI-generated images (AIGIs) detection. However, a fundamental challenge exists: AIGIs inherently contain generative traces with no trace-free counterpart available, making supervised extraction of these artifacts infeasible. In this work, we overcome this through a surrogate supervision framework. We design a dynamic reconstructor that simulates diverse generative traces on real images through stochastically varied architectures and parameters. The reconstruction residuals serve as supervision to train an extractor that learns to isolate traces, i.e., generative signatures (GenSign). A detector then fuses extracted GenSign with RGB features to distinguish real images from AIGIs. Our key insight is that sufficient architectural diversity in simulation enables effective transfer to real-world generators, resolving the absence of ground truth GenSign. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art generalization, confirming that our simulation-based learning paradigm is capable of extracting general and transferable forensic features.