UC-VLM: Consistency-Driven Learning for AI-Generated Image Detection with Vision-Language Large Models

Abstract

Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) are promising for AI-generated image (AIGI) detection because they can produce both a prediction and a natural-language output. However, most existing VLLM-based detectors primarily fine-tune the language side while giving limited attention to low-level visual forensic cues. They also often depend on manually crafted prompts or human-annotated rationales, which limits scalability.We present UC-VLM, a unified multi-stage framework for AIGI detection that relies solely on binary supervision. UC-VLM first identifies effective instruction variants automatically. It then reuses the same binary label within a multi-stage training framework: (i) a visual discrimination objective that strengthens sensitivity to non-semantic forensic cues, and (ii) a label-conditioned generation objective that uses the binary label to supervise textual outputs. This design turns weak binary supervision into a shared supervision signal for both the visual pathway and the language output. Our key novelty is a unified multi-stage binary-supervised framework that consistently reuses the same authenticity labels for visual adaptation and label-conditioned text generation, while leveraging automatically optimized instructions to reduce prompt sensitivity without requiring human-written rationales or hand-crafted prompts.Experiments show that UC-VLM achieves 96.1% average accuracy on GenImage, exceeding the strongest prior result by 4.6%, and obtains 69.6% / 77.9% accuracy on Chameleon under ProGAN / SDV1.4 training, surpassing the best baseline by 11.2% / 15.3%, respectively.