Improving Generalization in Deepfake Detection with Face Foundation Models and Metric Learning

The increasing realism and accessibility of deepfakes have raised critical concerns about media authenticity and information integrity. Despite recent advances, deepfake detection models often struggle to generalize beyond their training distributions, particularly when applied to media content found in the wild. In this work, we present a robust video deepfake detection framework with strong generalization that takes advantage of the rich facial representations learned by face foundation models. Our method is built on top of FSFM, a self-supervised model trained on real face data, and is further fine-tuned using an ensemble of deepfake datasets spanning both face-swapping and face-reenactment manipulations. To enhance discriminative power, we incorporate triplet loss variants during training, guiding the model to produce more separable embeddings between real and fake samples. Additionally, we explore attribution-based supervision schemes, where deepfakes are categorized by manipulation type or source dataset, to assess their impact on generalization. Extensive experiments across diverse evaluation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, especially in challenging real-world scenarios.

Heatmap Regression without Soft-Argmax for Facial Landmark Detection

Facial landmark detection is an important task in computer vision with numerous applications, such as head pose estimation, expression analysis, face swapping, etc. Heatmap regression-based methods have been widely used to achieve state-of-the-art results in this task. These methods involve computing the argmax over the heatmaps to predict a landmark. Since argmax is not differentiable, these methods use a differentiable approximation, Soft-argmax, to enable end-to-end training on deep-nets. In this work, we revisit this long-standing choice of using Soft-argmax and demonstrate that it is not the only way to achieve strong performance. Instead, we propose an alternative training objective based on the classic structured prediction framework. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three facial landmark benchmarks (WFLW, COFW, and 300W), converging 2.2x faster during training while maintaining better/competitive accuracy. Our code is available here: https://github.com/ca-joe-yang/regression-without-softarg.

Stand-In: A Lightweight and Plug-and-Play Identity Control for Video Generation

Generating high-fidelity human videos that match user-specified identities is important yet challenging in the field of generative AI. Existing methods often rely on an excessive number of training parameters and lack compatibility with other AIGC tools. In this paper, we propose Stand-In, a lightweight and plug-and-play framework for identity preservation in video generation. Specifically, we introduce a conditional image branch into the pre-trained video generation model. Identity control is achieved through restricted self-attentions with conditional position mapping, and can be learned quickly with only 2000 pairs. Despite incorporating and training just $\sim$1% additional parameters, our framework achieves excellent results in video quality and identity preservation, outperforming other full-parameter training methods. Moreover, our framework can be seamlessly integrated for other tasks, such as subject-driven video generation, pose-referenced video generation, stylization, and face swapping.

MotionSwap

Face swapping technology has gained significant attention in both academic research and commercial applications. This paper presents our implementation and enhancement of SimSwap, an efficient framework for high fidelity face swapping. We introduce several improvements to the original model, including the integration of self and cross-attention mechanisms in the generator architecture, dynamic loss weighting, and cosine annealing learning rate scheduling. These enhancements lead to significant improvements in identity preservation, attribute consistency, and overall visual quality. Our experimental results, spanning 400,000 training iterations, demonstrate progressive improvements in generator and discriminator performance. The enhanced model achieves better identity similarity, lower FID scores, and visibly superior qualitative results compared to the baseline. Ablation studies confirm the importance of each architectural and training improvement. We conclude by identifying key future directions, such as integrating StyleGAN3, improving lip synchronization, incorporating 3D facial modeling, and introducing temporal consistency for video-based applications.

Robust Deepfake Detection for Electronic Know Your Customer Systems Using Registered Images

In this paper, we present a deepfake detection algorithm specifically designed for electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) systems. To ensure the reliability of eKYC systems against deepfake attacks, it is essential to develop a robust deepfake detector capable of identifying both face swapping and face reenactment, while also being robust to image degradation. We address these challenges through three key contributions: (1)~Our approach evaluates the video's authenticity by detecting temporal inconsistencies in identity vectors extracted by face recognition models, leading to comprehensive detection of both face swapping and face reenactment. (2)~In addition to processing video input, the algorithm utilizes a registered image (assumed to be genuine) to calculate identity discrepancies between the input video and the registered image, significantly improving detection accuracy. (3)~We find that employing a face feature extractor trained on a larger dataset enhances both detection performance and robustness against image degradation. Our experimental results show that our proposed method accurately detects both face swapping and face reenactment comprehensively and is robust against various forms of unseen image degradation. Our source code is publicly available https://github.com/TaikiMiyagawa/DeepfakeDetection4eKYC.

Visual Language Models as Zero-Shot Deepfake Detectors

The contemporary phenomenon of deepfakes, utilizing GAN or diffusion models for face swapping, presents a substantial and evolving threat in digital media, identity verification, and a multitude of other systems. The majority of existing methods for detecting deepfakes rely on training specialized classifiers to distinguish between genuine and manipulated images, focusing only on the image domain without incorporating any auxiliary tasks that could enhance robustness. In this paper, inspired by the zero-shot capabilities of Vision Language Models, we propose a novel VLM-based approach to image classification and then evaluate it for deepfake detection. Specifically, we utilize a new high-quality deepfake dataset comprising 60,000 images, on which our zero-shot models demonstrate superior performance to almost all existing methods. Subsequently, we compare the performance of the best-performing architecture, InstructBLIP, on the popular deepfake dataset DFDC-P against traditional methods in two scenarios: zero-shot and in-domain fine-tuning. Our results demonstrate the superiority of VLMs over traditional classifiers.

Enhanced Deep Learning DeepFake Detection Integrating Handcrafted Features

The rapid advancement of deepfake and face swap technologies has raised significant concerns in digital security, particularly in identity verification and onboarding processes. Conventional detection methods often struggle to generalize against sophisticated facial manipulations. This study proposes an enhanced deep-learning detection framework that combines handcrafted frequency-domain features with conventional RGB inputs. This hybrid approach exploits frequency and spatial domain artifacts introduced during image manipulation, providing richer and more discriminative information to the classifier. Several frequency handcrafted features were evaluated, including the Steganalysis Rich Model, Discrete Cosine Transform, Error Level Analysis, Singular Value Decomposition, and Discrete Fourier Transform

Celeb-DF++: A Large-scale Challenging Video DeepFake Benchmark for Generalizable Forensics

The rapid advancement of AI technologies has significantly increased the diversity of DeepFake videos circulating online, posing a pressing challenge for \textit{generalizable forensics}, \ie, detecting a wide range of unseen DeepFake types using a single model. Addressing this challenge requires datasets that are not only large-scale but also rich in forgery diversity. However, most existing datasets, despite their scale, include only a limited variety of forgery types, making them insufficient for developing generalizable detection methods. Therefore, we build upon our earlier Celeb-DF dataset and introduce {Celeb-DF++}, a new large-scale and challenging video DeepFake benchmark dedicated to the generalizable forensics challenge. Celeb-DF++ covers three commonly encountered forgery scenarios: Face-swap (FS), Face-reenactment (FR), and Talking-face (TF). Each scenario contains a substantial number of high-quality forged videos, generated using a total of 22 various recent DeepFake methods. These methods differ in terms of architectures, generation pipelines, and targeted facial regions, covering the most prevalent DeepFake cases witnessed in the wild. We also introduce evaluation protocols for measuring the generalizability of 24 recent detection methods, highlighting the limitations of existing detection methods and the difficulty of our new dataset.

CanonSwap: High-Fidelity and Consistent Video Face Swapping via Canonical Space Modulation

Video face swapping aims to address two primary challenges: effectively transferring the source identity to the target video and accurately preserving the dynamic attributes of the target face, such as head poses, facial expressions, lip-sync, \etc. Existing methods mainly focus on achieving high-quality identity transfer but often fall short in maintaining the dynamic attributes of the target face, leading to inconsistent results. We attribute this issue to the inherent coupling of facial appearance and motion in videos. To address this, we propose CanonSwap, a novel video face-swapping framework that decouples motion information from appearance information. Specifically, CanonSwap first eliminates motion-related information, enabling identity modification within a unified canonical space. Subsequently, the swapped feature is reintegrated into the original video space, ensuring the preservation of the target face's dynamic attributes. To further achieve precise identity transfer with minimal artifacts and enhanced realism, we design a Partial Identity Modulation module that adaptively integrates source identity features using a spatial mask to restrict modifications to facial regions. Additionally, we introduce several fine-grained synchronization metrics to comprehensively evaluate the performance of video face swapping methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of visual quality, temporal consistency, and identity preservation. Our project page are publicly available at https://luoxyhappy.github.io/CanonSwap/.

FAME: A Lightweight Spatio-Temporal Network for Model Attribution of Face-Swap Deepfakes

The widespread emergence of face-swap Deepfake videos poses growing risks to digital security, privacy, and media integrity, necessitating effective forensic tools for identifying the source of such manipulations. Although most prior research has focused primarily on binary Deepfake detection, the task of model attribution -- determining which generative model produced a given Deepfake -- remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce FAME (Fake Attribution via Multilevel Embeddings), a lightweight and efficient spatio-temporal framework designed to capture subtle generative artifacts specific to different face-swap models. FAME integrates spatial and temporal attention mechanisms to improve attribution accuracy while remaining computationally efficient. We evaluate our model on three challenging and diverse datasets: Deepfake Detection and Manipulation (DFDM), FaceForensics++, and FakeAVCeleb. Results show that FAME consistently outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and runtime, highlighting its potential for deployment in real-world forensic and information security applications.