AI-GenBench: A New Ongoing Benchmark for AI-Generated Image Detection

Lorenzo Pellegrini, Davide Cozzolino, Serafino Pandolfini, Davide Maltoni, Matteo Ferrara, Luisa Verdoliva, Marco Prati, Marco Ramilli (30/06/2025)

1. MI@BioLab - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Cesena, Italy
2. GRIP - Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy
3. identifAI, Italy

Presented at Verimedia workshop, IJCNN 2025

The rapid advancement of generative AI has revolutionized image creation, enabling high-quality synthesis from text prompts while raising critical challenges for media authenticity. We present AI-GenBench, a novel benchmark designed to address the urgent need for robust detection of AI-generated images in real-world scenarios. Unlike existing solutions that evaluate models on static datasets, AI-GenBench introduces a temporal evaluation framework where detection methods are incrementally trained on synthetic images, historically ordered by their generative models, to test their ability to generalize to new generative models, such as the transition from GANs to diffusion models. Our benchmark focuses on high-quality, diverse visual content and overcomes key limitations of current approaches, including arbitrary dataset splits, unfair comparisons, and excessive computational demands. AI-GenBench provides a comprehensive dataset, a standardized evaluation protocol, and accessible tools for both researchers and non-experts (e.g., journalists, fact-checkers), ensuring reproducibility while maintaining practical training requirements. By establishing clear evaluation rules and controlled augmentation strategies, AI-GenBench enables meaningful comparison of detection methods and scalable solutions. Code and data are publicly available to ensure reproducibility and to support the development of robust forensic detectors to keep pace with the rise of new synthetic generators.