Scalable Black-Box Model Attribution for Images

arXiv:2608.15652v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid proliferation of generative models raises the model attribution problem: given only an image, can we determine which model produced it? We propose a lightweight CNN to solve this problem in a strict black box setting. The CNN operates on multiple image patches to handle varying image size and improve accuracy. It attributes more models at higher accuracy than prior work, reaching 98.9% on 25-class DRAGON and 95.0% on 27-class OpenFake; runs in a few milliseconds at a cost nearly independent of candidate-set size; and remains robust to transformations encountered in the wild. Beyond closed-set attribution, its learned representation serves as a reusable fingerprint backbone: it supports open-set rejection and few-shot enrollment, recovers model-family structure without lineage supervision, and groups images from unseen generators by source. Controlled ablations and causal perturbations show that its attribution decisions are driven by a spatially local, low-level signal that behaves as a generator-specific fingerprint.