HydraPrompt: An Adaptive and Asymmetric Framework of Vision-Language Models for Synthetic Image Detection

Abstract

The rapid evolution of generative models has precipitated a proliferation of fabricated content, posing significant challenges to existing Synthetic Image Detection (SID) methods. Capitalizing on advancements in vision-language models (e.g., CLIP), recent attempts have leveraged learnable textual prompts to identify synthetic images. However, they still leverage static prompt as a fixed boundary for real and fake images, failing to adapt to the varying types of forgery that emerge during inference. To overcome this issue, we propose **HydraPrompt**, an asymmetric prompting framework that dynamically adjusts the category centers by aligning with fine-grained image cues. Specifically, we propose an Asymmetric Prompt Adapter (**APA**): (1) for authentic category, we introduce a single set of prompts to capture the consistent representative patterns, which serves as a unified anchor for real content. While (2) for fake category, we construct sample-adaptive prompts that specialize in capturing diverse cues from different samples, enabling adaptive modeling of forgery image variations. To increase pronounced discriminability within different synthetic images, we further introduce a Conditional Supervised Contrastive (**CSC**) objective, which compacts the authentic representations while capturing fine-grained forgery clues. Extensive experiments on popular SID benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our framework.