DiffusionPrint: Learning Generative Fingerprints for Diffusion-Based Inpainting Localization

arXiv cs.CV / 4/15/2026

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Key Points

  • Diffusion-based inpainting can undermine existing image forgery localization methods by regenerating entire images through latent decoders that erase camera-level noise patterns used for forensics.
  • The paper introduces DiffusionPrint, a patch-level contrastive learning framework that learns a robust “generative fingerprint” forensic signal resilient to spectral distortions from latent decoding.
  • DiffusionPrint uses self-supervision by leveraging the observation that inpainted regions produced by the same model exhibit consistent fingerprints, training a convolutional backbone with a MoCo-style objective and hard negative mining.
  • It outputs a discriminative forensic feature map intended to act as a secondary modality in fusion-based IFL pipelines, improving localization when integrated into TruFor, MMFusion, and a lightweight baseline.
  • Reported results show consistent gains across multiple generative models, including up to +28% on unseen mask types and generalization to unseen generative architectures, with code released on GitHub.

Abstract

Modern diffusion-based inpainting models pose significant challenges for image forgery localization (IFL), as their full regeneration pipelines reconstruct the entire image via a latent decoder, disrupting the camera-level noise patterns that existing forensic methods rely on. We propose DiffusionPrint, a patch-level contrastive learning framework that learns a forensic signal robust to the spectral distortions introduced by latent decoding. It exploits the fact that inpainted regions generated by the same model share a consistent generative fingerprint, using this as a self-supervisory signal. DiffusionPrint trains a convolutional backbone via a MoCo-style objective with cross-category hard negative mining and a generator-aware classification head, producing a forensic feature map that serves as a highly discriminative secondary modality in fusion-based IFL frameworks. Integrated into TruFor, MMFusion, and a lightweight fusion baseline, DiffusionPrint consistently improves localization across multiple generative models, with gains of up to +28% on mask types unseen during fine-tuning and confirmed generalization to unseen generative architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/mever-team/diffusionprint