Temporal Slice Learning for AI-Generated Video Detection with 400× Fewer FLOPs

Recent advances in generative video models have significantly improved visual realism, making detection increasingly dependent on subtle temporal inconsistencies arising from imperfect frame-to-frame coherence. However, these signals are weak and spatially localized, while most of the video content is redundant. This creates a fundamental mismatch: existing detectors rely on heavy backbones to model full videos, assuming increased capacity can capture such cues, which leads to high computational cost and limited scalability. In this work, we rethink AI-generated video detection from a representation perspective. Instead of modeling entire videos, we propose to explicitly restructure them into compact temporal slice representations that isolate informative temporal evolution. Based on this idea, we introduce a lightweight framework using frequency-aware temporal slice consistency learning, where informative spatial rows and columns are aggregated over time to form slice-domain inputs. This reparameterization suppresses redundant appearance while preserving discriminative temporal dynamics, enabling efficient and targeted detection. By constructing slices from both high- and low-frequency regions, our method exposes complementary temporal artifacts, including unstable details and abnormal motion smoothness. We instantiate this idea in a $\textit{Temporal Slice Consistency Network}$, which integrates task-driven slice localization, hierarchical positional encoding, and a lightweight Transformer to model cross-slice and cross-frequency dependencies with minimal overhead. We further introduce $\textit{AI-Artist}$, a new benchmark with artist-curated videos from recent high-fidelity generators, including Seedance and Kling. Experiments on GenVideo and AI-Artist show that our method achieves strong performance while requiring over 400× fewer FLOPs and 3.6× faster inference than the strong video-based baseline ReStraV, enabling scalable and practical deployment.