COMPASS: Contextual Moment Prior Alignment for Generalizable AIGI Detection

Generalizable AI-generated image (AIGI) and deepfake detection remains challenging due to the asymmetry phenomenon, where adaptation to limited training distributions can degrade the transferable representations of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Recent subspace adaptation methods mitigate this issue by freezing high-magnitude principal components while adapting the residual subspace. However, such magnitude-based decomposition is data-agnostic and does not explicitly account for target-relevant semantics, potentially leading to semantic misalignment. We propose COMPASS (COntextual Moment Prior Alignment for Subspace Separation), a data-aware subspace adaptation framework that uses a small unlabeled Semantic Proxy Set to estimate target activation statistics. COMPASS incorporates activation covariance into the decomposition of pre-trained weights, preserving target-relevant representations as a stable semantic reference while the residual adapter learns forgery-related variations. The proxy calibration requires no gradient-based optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generalization across cross-dataset, cross-method, joint cross-dataset-method, and open-world cross-generator evaluations, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both Deepfake and AIGI detection benchmarks. Source code and trained models will be publicly released.