D3QE: Learning Discrete Distribution Discrepancy-Aware Quantization Error for Autoregressive-Generated Image Detection

The emergence of visual autoregressive (AR) models has revolutionized image generation while presenting new challenges for synthetic image detection. Unlike previous GAN or diffusion-based methods, AR models generate images through discrete token prediction, exhibiting both marked improvements in image synthesis quality and unique characteristics in their vector-quantized representations. In this paper, we propose to leverage Discrete Distribution Discrepancy-aware Quantization Error (D3QE) for autoregressive-generated image detection that exploits the distinctive patterns and the frequency distribution bias of the codebook existing in real and fake images. We introduce a discrete distribution discrepancy-aware transformer that integrates dynamic codebook frequency statistics into its attention mechanism, fusing semantic features and quantization error latent. To evaluate our method, we construct a comprehensive dataset termed ARForensics covering 7 mainstream visual A R models. Experiments demonstrate superior detection accuracy and strong generalization of D3 Q E across different AR models, with robustness to real-world perturbations. Code is available at https://github.com/Zhangyr2022/D3QE.