Towards Generalizable Deepfake Detection with Spatial-Frequency Collaborative Learning and Hierarchical Cross-Modal Fusion

The rapid evolution of deep generative models poses a critical challenge to deepfake detection, as detectors trained on forgery-specific artifacts often suffer significant performance degradation when encountering unseen forgeries. While existing methods predominantly rely on spatial domain analysis, frequency domain operations are primarily limited to feature-level augmentation, leaving frequency-native artifacts and spatial-frequency interactions insufficiently exploited. To address this limitation, we propose a novel detection framework that integrates multi-scale spatial-frequency analysis for universal deepfake detection. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) a local spectral feature extraction pipeline that combines block-wise discrete cosine transform with cascaded multi-scale convolutions to capture subtle spectral artifacts; (2) a global spectral feature extraction pipeline utilizing scale-invariant differential accumulation to identify holistic forgery distribution patterns; and (3) a multi-stage cross-modal fusion mechanism that incorporates shallow-layer attention enhancement and deep-layer dynamic modulation to model spatial-frequency interactions. Extensive evaluations on widely adopted benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art deepfake detection methods in both accuracy and generalizability.

Benchmarking Audio Deepfake Detection Robustness in Real-world Communication Scenarios

Existing Audio Deepfake Detection (ADD) systems often struggle to generalise effectively due to the significantly degraded audio quality caused by audio codec compression and channel transmission effects in real-world communication scenarios. To address this challenge, we developed a rigorous benchmark to evaluate ADD system performance under such scenarios. We introduced ADD-C, a new test dataset to evaluate the robustness of ADD systems under diverse communication conditions, including different combinations of audio codecs for compression and Packet Loss Rates (PLR). Benchmarking on three baseline ADD models with the ADD-C dataset demonstrated a significant decline in robustness under such conditions. A novel data augmentation strategy was proposed to improve the robustness of ADD systems. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach increases the performance of ADD systems significantly with the proposed ADD-C dataset. Our benchmark can assist future efforts towards building practical and robustly generalisable ADD systems.

Generalized Audio Deepfake Detection Using Frame-level Latent Information Entropy

Generalizability, the capacity of a robust model to perform effectively on unseen data, is crucial for audio deepfake detection due to the rapid evolution of text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) technologies. A promising approach to differentiate between bonafide and spoof samples lies in identifying intrinsic disparities to enhance model generalizability. From an information-theoretic perspective, we hypothesize the information content is one of the intrinsic differences: bonafide sample represents a dense, information-rich sampling of the real world, whereas spoof sample is typically derived from lower-dimensional, less informative representations. To implement this, we introduce frame-level latent information entropy detector(f-InfoED), a framework that extracts distinctive information entropy from latent representations at the frame level to identify audio deepfakes. Furthermore, we present AdaLAM, which extends large pre-trained audio models with trainable adapters for enhanced feature extraction. To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, the audio deepfake forensics 2024 (ADFF 2024) dataset was built by the latest TTS and VC methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits remarkable generalization capabilities. Further analytical studies confirms the efficacy of AdaLAM in extracting discriminative audio features and f-InfoED in leveraging latent entropy information for more generalized deepfake detection.

MLEP: Multi-granularity Local Entropy Patterns for Universal AI-generated Image Detection

Advancements in image generation technologies have raised significant concerns about their potential misuse, such as producing misinformation and deepfakes. Therefore, there is an urgent need for effective methods to detect AI-generated images (AIGI). Despite progress in AIGI detection, achieving reliable performance across diverse generation models and scenes remains challenging due to the lack of source-invariant features and limited generalization capabilities in existing methods. In this work, we explore the potential of using image entropy as a cue for AIGI detection and propose Multi-granularity Local Entropy Patterns (MLEP), a set of entropy feature maps computed across shuffled small patches over multiple image scaled. MLEP comprehensively captures pixel relationships across dimensions and scales while significantly disrupting image semantics, reducing potential content bias. Leveraging MLEP, a robust CNN-based classifier for AIGI detection can be trained. Extensive experiments conducted in an open-world scenario, evaluating images synthesized by 32 distinct generative models, demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and generalization.

Big Brother is Watching: Proactive Deepfake Detection via Learnable Hidden Face

As deepfake technologies continue to advance, passive detection methods struggle to generalize with various forgery manipulations and datasets. Proactive defense techniques have been actively studied with the primary aim of preventing deepfake operation effectively working. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap between passive detection and proactive defense, and seek to solve the detection problem utilizing a proactive methodology. Inspired by several watermarking-based forensic methods, we explore a novel detection framework based on the concept of ``hiding a learnable face within a face''. Specifically, relying on a semi-fragile invertible steganography network, a secret template image is embedded into a host image imperceptibly, acting as an indicator monitoring for any malicious image forgery when being restored by the inverse steganography process. Instead of being manually specified, the secret template is optimized during training to resemble a neutral facial appearance, just like a ``big brother'' hidden in the image to be protected. By incorporating a self-blending mechanism and robustness learning strategy with a simulative transmission channel, a robust detector is built to accurately distinguish if the steganographic image is maliciously tampered or benignly processed. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over competing passive and proactive detection methods.

FractalForensics: Proactive Deepfake Detection and Localization via Fractal Watermarks

Proactive Deepfake detection via robust watermarks has been raised ever since passive Deepfake detectors encountered challenges in identifying high-quality synthetic images. However, while demonstrating reasonable detection performance, they lack localization functionality and explainability in detection results. Additionally, the unstable robustness of watermarks can significantly affect the detection performance accordingly. In this study, we propose novel fractal watermarks for proactive Deepfake detection and localization, namely FractalForensics. Benefiting from the characteristics of fractals, we devise a parameter-driven watermark generation pipeline that derives fractal-based watermarks and conducts one-way encryption regarding the parameters selected. Subsequently, we propose a semi-fragile watermarking framework for watermark embedding and recovery, trained to be robust against benign image processing operations and fragile when facing Deepfake manipulations in a black-box setting. Meanwhile, we introduce an entry-to-patch strategy that implicitly embeds the watermark matrix entries into image patches at corresponding positions, achieving localization of Deepfake manipulations. Extensive experiments demonstrate satisfactory robustness and fragility of our approach against common image processing operations and Deepfake manipulations, outperforming state-of-the-art semi-fragile watermarking algorithms and passive detectors for Deepfake detection. Furthermore, by highlighting the areas manipulated, our method provides explainability for the proactive Deepfake detection results.

Detect All-Type Deepfake Audio: Wavelet Prompt Tuning for Enhanced Auditory Perception

The rapid advancement of audio generation technologies has escalated the risks of malicious deepfake audio across speech, sound, singing voice, and music, threatening multimedia security and trust. While existing countermeasures (CMs) perform well in single-type audio deepfake detection (ADD), their performance declines in cross-type scenarios. This paper is dedicated to studying the alltype ADD task. We are the first to comprehensively establish an all-type ADD benchmark to evaluate current CMs, incorporating cross-type deepfake detection across speech, sound, singing voice, and music. Then, we introduce the prompt tuning self-supervised learning (PT-SSL) training paradigm, which optimizes SSL frontend by learning specialized prompt tokens for ADD, requiring 458x fewer trainable parameters than fine-tuning (FT). Considering the auditory perception of different audio types,we propose the wavelet prompt tuning (WPT)-SSL method to capture type-invariant auditory deepfake information from the frequency domain without requiring additional training parameters, thereby enhancing performance over FT in the all-type ADD task. To achieve an universally CM, we utilize all types of deepfake audio for co-training. Experimental results demonstrate that WPT-XLSR-AASIST achieved the best performance, with an average EER of 3.58% across all evaluation sets. The code is available online.

LoRAX: LoRA eXpandable Networks for Continual Synthetic Image Attribution

As generative AI image technologies become more widespread and advanced, there is a growing need for strong attribution models. These models are crucial for verifying the authenticity of images and identifying the architecture of their originating generative models-key to maintaining media integrity. However, attribution models struggle to generalize to unseen models, and traditional fine-tuning methods for updating these models have shown to be impractical in real-world settings. To address these challenges, we propose LoRA eXpandable Networks (LoRAX), a parameter-efficient class incremental algorithm that adapts to novel generative image models without the need for full retraining. Our approach trains an extremely parameter-efficient feature extractor per continual learning task via Low Rank Adaptation. Each task-specific feature extractor learns distinct features while only requiring a small fraction of the parameters present in the underlying feature extractor's backbone model. Our extensive experimentation shows LoRAX outperforms or remains competitive with state-of-the-art class incremental learning algorithms on the Continual Deepfake Detection benchmark across all training scenarios and memory settings, while requiring less than 3% of the number of trainable parameters per feature extractor compared to the full-rank implementation. LoRAX code is available at: https://github.com/mit-ll/lorax_cil.

Face-LLaVA: Facial Expression and Attribute Understanding through Instruction Tuning

The human face plays a central role in social communication, necessitating the use of performant computer vision tools for human-centered applications. We propose Face-LLaVA, a multimodal large language model for face-centered, in-context learning, including facial expression and attribute recognition. Additionally, Face-LLaVA is able to generate natural language descriptions that can be used for reasoning. Leveraging existing visual databases, we first developed FaceInstruct-1M, a face-centered database for instruction tuning MLLMs for face processing. We then developed a novel face-specific visual encoder powered by Face-Region Guided Cross-Attention that integrates face geometry with local visual features. We evaluated the proposed method across nine different datasets and five different face processing tasks, including facial expression recognition, action unit detection, facial attribute detection, age estimation and deepfake detection. Face-LLaVA achieves superior results compared to existing open-source MLLMs and competitive performance compared to commercial solutions. Our model output also receives a higher reasoning rating by GPT under a zero-shot setting across all the tasks. Both our dataset and model wil be released at https://face-llava.github.io to support future advancements in social AI and foundational vision-language research.

From Specificity to Generality: Revisiting Generalizable Artifacts in Detecting Face Deepfakes

Detecting deepfakes has been an increasingly important topic, especially given the rapid development of AI generation techniques. In this paper, we ask: How can we build a universal detection framework that is effective for most facial deepfakes? One significant challenge is the wide variety of deepfake generators available, resulting in varying forgery artifacts (e.g., lighting inconsistency, color mismatch, etc). But should we ``teach" the detector to learn all these artifacts separately? It is impossible and impractical to elaborate on them all. So the core idea is to pinpoint the more common and general artifacts across different deepfakes. Accordingly, we categorize deepfake artifacts into two distinct yet complementary types: Face Inconsistency Artifacts (FIA) and Up-Sampling Artifacts (USA). FIA arise from the challenge of generating all intricate details, inevitably causing inconsistencies between the complex facial features and relatively uniform surrounding areas. USA, on the other hand, are the inevitable traces left by the generator's decoder during the up-sampling process. This categorization stems from the observation that all existing deepfakes typically exhibit one or both of these artifacts. To achieve this, we propose a new data-level pseudo-fake creation framework that constructs fake samples with only the FIA and USA, without introducing extra less-general artifacts. Specifically, we employ a super-resolution to simulate the USA, while design a Blender module that uses image-level self-blending on diverse facial regions to create the FIA. We surprisingly found that, with this intuitive design, a standard image classifier trained only with our pseudo-fake data can non-trivially generalize well to unseen deepfakes.