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Identifying Models Behind Text-to-Image Leaderboards

Published: January 14, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.09647v1

By: Ali Naseh , Yuefeng Peng , Anshuman Suri and more

Potential Business Impact:

Identifies which AI made a picture.

Business Areas:
Image Recognition Data and Analytics, Software

Text-to-image (T2I) models are increasingly popular, producing a large share of AI-generated images online. To compare model quality, voting-based leaderboards have become the standard, relying on anonymized model outputs for fairness. In this work, we show that such anonymity can be easily broken. We find that generations from each T2I model form distinctive clusters in the image embedding space, enabling accurate deanonymization without prompt control or training data. Using 22 models and 280 prompts (150K images), our centroid-based method achieves high accuracy and reveals systematic model-specific signatures. We further introduce a prompt-level distinguishability metric and conduct large-scale analyses showing how certain prompts can lead to near-perfect distinguishability. Our findings expose fundamental security flaws in T2I leaderboards and motivate stronger anonymization defenses.

Country of Origin
πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ United States

Page Count
17 pages

Category
Computer Science:
CV and Pattern Recognition