This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Robust AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild, held in conjunction with the NTIRE workshop at CVPR 2026. The goal of this challenge was to develop detection models capable of distinguishing real images from generated ones in realistic scenarios: the images are often transformed (cropped, resized, compressed, blurred) for practical usage, and therefore, the detection models should be robust to such transformations. The challenge is based on a novel dataset consisting of 108,750 real and 185,750 AI-generated images from 42 generators comprising a large variety of open-source and closed-source models of various architectures, augmented with 36 image transformations. Methods were evaluated using ROC AUC on the full test set, including both transformed and untransformed images. A total of 511 participants registered, with 20 teams submitting valid final solutions. This report provides a comprehensive overview of the challenge, describes the proposed solutions, and can be used as a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners in increasing the robustness of the detection models to real-world transformations.
@article{arxiv.2604.11487,
title = {NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Robust AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild},
author = {Aleksandr Gushchin and Khaled Abud and Ekaterina Shumitskaya and Artem Filippov and Georgii Bychkov and Sergey Lavrushkin and Mikhail Erofeev and Anastasia Antsiferova and Changsheng Chen and Shunquan Tan and Radu Timofte and Dmitry Vatolin and Chuanbiao Song and Zijian Yu and Hao Tan and Jun Lan and Zhiqiang Yang and Yongwei Tang and Zhiqiang Wu and Jia Wen Seow and Hong Vin Koay and Haodong Ren and Feng Xu and Shuai Chen and Ruiyang Xia and Qi Zhang and Yaowen Xu and Zhaofan Zou and Hao Sun and Dagong Lu and Mufeng Yao and Xinlei Xu and Fei Wu and Fengjun Guo and Cong Luo and Hardik Sharma and Aashish Negi and Prateek Shaily and Jayant Kumar and Sachin Chaudhary and Akshay Dudhane and Praful Hambarde and Amit Shukla and Zhilin Tu and Fengpeng Li and Jiamin Zhang and Jianwei Fei and Kemou Li and Haiwei Wu and Bilel Benjdira and Anas M. Ali and Wadii Boulila and Chenfan Qu and Junchi Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.11487},
year = {2026}
}