Detecting Compressed AI-Generated Images via Phase Spectrum Robustness

This paper aims to present a robust AI-generated image detection framework designed to address performance degradation caused by image compression in online social networks. The key challenges are twofold: 1) compression destroys fragile artifacts that are crucial to existing methods, and 2) it introduces new compression artifacts that interfere with detection. Existing methods typically enhance the compression robustness by collecting original-compression pairs and compression labels. However, the collection and annotation process is highly resource-intensive. To address these issues, we propose a Compression-Robust Phase-Harmonized Transformer, motivated by the observation that phase spectrum remains stable under compression. The framework consists of a phase-harmonized cross-modal interaction module that leverages phase spectrum information for feature fusion, enhancing compression robustness, and a multi-domain modulation adapter that further refines fused features while enabling parameter-efficient finetuning. In particular, the framework operates without requiring compression-original data pairs and compression labels. When limited compression labels are available, we introduce a difficulty-aware consistency loss to maximize their utility by prioritizing hard compressed samples during training, further boosting robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, exhibiting superior robustness against image compression.