MoE-FFD: Mixture of Experts for Generalized and Parameter-Efficient Face Forgery Detection

Deepfakes have recently raised significant trust issues and security concerns among the public. Compared to CNN face forgery detectors, ViT-based methods take advantage of the expressivity of transformers, achieving superior detection performance. However, these approaches still exhibit the following limitations: (1). Fully fine-tuning ViT-based models from ImageNet weights demands substantial computational and storage resources; (2). ViT-based methods struggle to capture local forgery clues, leading to model bias and limited generalizability. To tackle these challenges, this work introduces Mixture-of-Experts modules for Face Forgery Detection (MoE-FFD), a generalized yet parameter-efficient ViT-based approach. MoE-FFD only updates lightweight Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Adapter layers while keeping the ViT backbone frozen, thereby achieving parameter-efficient training. Moreover, MoE-FFD leverages the expressivity of transformers and local priors of CNNs to simultaneously extract global and local forgery clues. Additionally, novel MoE modules are designed to scale the model's capacity and select optimal forgery experts, further enhancing forgery detection performance. The proposed MoE learning scheme can be seamlessly adapted to various transformer backbones in a plug-and-play manner. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art face forgery detection performance with reduced parameter overhead. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Pixel-Inconsistency Modeling for Image Manipulation Localization

Digital image forensics plays a crucial role in image authentication and manipulation localization. Despite the progress powered by deep neural networks, existing forgery localization methodologies exhibit limitations when deployed to unseen datasets and perturbed images (i.e., lack of generalization and robustness to real-world applications). To circumvent these problems and aid image integrity, this paper presents a generalized and robust manipulation localization model through the analysis of pixel inconsistency artifacts. The rationale is grounded on the observation that most image signal processors (ISP) involve the demosaicing process, which introduces pixel correlations in pristine images. Moreover, manipulating operations, including splicing, copy-move, and inpainting, directly affect such pixel regularity. We, therefore, first split the input image into several blocks and design masked self-attention mechanisms to model the global pixel dependency in input images. Simultaneously, we optimize another local pixel dependency stream to mine local manipulation clues within input forgery images. In addition, we design novel Learning-to-Weight Modules (LWM) to combine features from the two streams, thereby enhancing the final forgery localization performance. To improve the training process, we propose a novel Pixel-Inconsistency Data Augmentation (PIDA) strategy, driving the model to focus on capturing inherent pixel-level artifacts instead of mining semantic forgery traces. This work establishes a comprehensive benchmark integrating 15 representative detection models across 12 datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method successfully extracts inherent pixel-inconsistency forgery fingerprints and achieve state-of-the-art generalization and robustness performances in image manipulation localization.

Forgery-aware Adaptive Vision Transformer for Face Forgery Detection

With the advancement in face manipulation technologies, the importance of face forgery detection in protecting authentication integrity becomes increasingly evident. Previous Vision Transformer (ViT)-based detectors have demonstrated subpar performance in cross-database evaluations, primarily because fully fine-tuning with limited Deepfake data often leads to forgetting pre-trained knowledge and over-fitting to data-specific ones. To circumvent these issues, we propose a novel Forgery-aware Adaptive Vision Transformer (FA-ViT). In FA-ViT, the vanilla ViT's parameters are frozen to preserve its pre-trained knowledge, while two specially designed components, the Local-aware Forgery Injector (LFI) and the Global-aware Forgery Adaptor (GFA), are employed to adapt forgery-related knowledge. our proposed FA-ViT effectively combines these two different types of knowledge to form the general forgery features for detecting Deepfakes. Specifically, LFI captures local discriminative information and incorporates these information into ViT via Neighborhood-Preserving Cross Attention (NPCA). Simultaneously, GFA learns adaptive knowledge in the self-attention layer, bridging the gap between the two different domain. Furthermore, we design a novel Single Domain Pairwise Learning (SDPL) to facilitate fine-grained information learning in FA-ViT. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our FA-ViT achieves state-of-the-art performance in cross-dataset evaluation and cross-manipulation scenarios, and improves the robustness against unseen perturbations.

Beyond the Prior Forgery Knowledge: Mining Critical Clues for General Face Forgery Detection

Face forgery detection is essential in combating malicious digital face attacks. Previous methods mainly rely on prior expert knowledge to capture specific forgery clues, such as noise patterns, blending boundaries, and frequency artifacts. However, these methods tend to get trapped in local optima, resulting in limited robustness and generalization capability. To address these issues, we propose a novel Critical Forgery Mining (CFM) framework, which can be flexibly assembled with various backbones to boost their generalization and robustness performance. Specifically, we first build a fine-grained triplet and suppress specific forgery traces through prior knowledge-agnostic data augmentation. Subsequently, we propose a fine-grained relation learning prototype to mine critical information in forgeries through instance and local similarity-aware losses. Moreover, we design a novel progressive learning controller to guide the model to focus on principal feature components, enabling it to learn critical forgery features in a coarse-to-fine manner. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art forgery detection performance under various challenging evaluation settings.