SNAP: Speaker Nulling for Artifact Projection in Speech Deepfake Detection

Recent advancements in text-to-speech technologies enable generating high-fidelity synthetic speech nearly indistinguishable from real human voices. While recent studies show the efficacy of self-supervised learning-based speech encoders for deepfake detection, these models struggle to generalize across unseen speakers. Our quantitative analysis suggests these encoder representations are substantially influenced by speaker information, causing detectors to exploit speaker-specific correlations rather than artifact-related cues. We call this phenomenon speaker entanglement. To mitigate this reliance, we introduce SNAP, a speaker-nulling framework. We estimate a speaker subspace and apply orthogonal projection to suppress speaker-dependent components, isolating synthesis artifacts within the residual features. By reducing speaker entanglement, SNAP encourages detectors to focus on artifact-related patterns, leading to state-of-the-art performance.

SAiW: Source-Attributable Invisible Watermarking for Proactive Deepfake Defense

Deepfakes generated by modern generative models pose a serious threat to information integrity, digital identity, and public trust. Existing detection methods are largely reactive, attempting to identify manipulations after they occur and often failing to generalize across evolving generation techniques. This motivates the need for proactive mechanisms that secure media authenticity at the time of creation. In this work, we introduce SAiW, a Source-Attributed Invisible watermarking Framework for proactive deepfake defense and media provenance verification. Unlike conventional watermarking methods that treat watermark payloads as generic signals, SAiW formulates watermark embedding as a source-conditioned representation learning problem, where watermark identity encodes the originating source and modulates the embedding process to produce discriminative and traceable signatures. The framework integrates feature-wise linear modulation to inject source identity into the embedding network, enabling scalable multi-source watermark generation. A perceptual guidance module derived from human visual system priors ensures that watermark perturbations remain visually imperceptible while maintaining robustness. In addition, a dual-purpose forensic decoder simultaneously reconstructs the embedded watermark and performs source attribution, providing both automated verification and interpretable forensic evidence. Extensive experiments across multiple deepfake datasets demonstrate that SAiW achieves high perceptual quality while maintaining strong robustness against compression, filtering, noise, geometric transformations, and adversarial perturbations. By binding digital media to its origin through invisible yet verifiable markers, SAiW enables reliable authentication and source attribution, providing a scalable foundation for proactive deepfake defense and trustworthy media provenance.

Human-AI Ensembles Improve Deepfake Detection in Low-to-Medium Quality Videos

Deepfake detection is widely framed as a machine learning problem, yet how humans and AI detectors compare under realistic conditions remains poorly understood. We evaluate 200 human participants and 95 state-of-the-art AI detectors across two datasets: DF40, a standard benchmark, and CharadesDF, a novel dataset of videos of everyday activities. CharadesDF was recorded using mobile phones leading to low/moderate quality videos compared to the more professionally captured DF40. Humans outperform AI detectors on both datasets, with the gap widening in the case of CharadesDF where AI accuracy collapses to near chance (0.537) while humans maintain robust performance (0.784). Human and AI errors are complementary: humans miss high-quality deepfakes while AI detectors flag authentic videos as fake, and hybrid human-AI ensembles reduce high-confidence errors. These findings suggest that effective real-world deepfake detection, especially in non-professionally produced videos, requires human-AI collaboration rather than AI algorithms alone.

Towards Robust Speech Deepfake Detection via Human-Inspired Reasoning

The modern generative audio models can be used by an adversary in an unlawful manner, specifically, to impersonate other people to gain access to private information. To mitigate this issue, speech deepfake detection (SDD) methods started to evolve. Unfortunately, current SDD methods generally suffer from the lack of generalization to new audio domains and generators. More than that, they lack interpretability, especially human-like reasoning that would naturally explain the attribution of a given audio to the bona fide or spoof class and provide human-perceptible cues. In this paper, we propose HIR-SDD, a novel SDD framework that combines the strengths of Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) with the chain-of-thought reasoning derived from the novel proposed human-annotated dataset. Experimental evaluation demonstrates both the effectiveness of the proposed method and its ability to provide reasonable justifications for predictions.

Gender Fairness in Audio Deepfake Detection: Performance and Disparity Analysis

Audio deepfake detection aims to detect real human voices from those generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and has emerged as a significant problem in the field of voice biometrics systems. With the ever-improving quality of synthetic voice, the probability of such a voice being exploited for illicit practices like identity thest and impersonation increases. Although significant progress has been made in the field of Audio Deepfake Detection in recent times, the issue of gender bias remains underexplored and in its nascent stage In this paper, we have attempted a thorough analysis of gender dependent performance and fairness in audio deepfake detection models. We have used the ASVspoof 5 dataset and train a ResNet-18 classifier and evaluate detection performance across four different audio features, and compared the performance with baseline AASIST model. Beyond conventional metrics such as Equal Error Rate (EER %), we incorporated five established fairness metrics to quantify gender disparities in the model. Our results show that even when the overall EER difference between genders appears low, fairness-aware evaluation reveals disparities in error distribution that are obscured by aggregate performance measures. These findings demonstrate that reliance on standard metrics is unreliable, whereas fairness metrics provide critical insights into demographic-specific failure modes. This work highlights the importance of fairness-aware evaluation for developing a more equitable, robust, and trustworthy audio deepfake detection system.

X-AVDT: Audio-Visual Cross-Attention for Robust Deepfake Detection

The surge of highly realistic synthetic videos produced by contemporary generative systems has significantly increased the risk of malicious use, challenging both humans and existing detectors. Against this backdrop, we take a generator-side view and observe that internal cross-attention mechanisms in these models encode fine-grained speech-motion alignment, offering useful correspondence cues for forgery detection. Building on this insight, we propose X-AVDT, a robust and generalizable deepfake detector that probes generator-internal audio-visual signals accessed via DDIM inversion to expose these cues. X-AVDT extracts two complementary signals: (i) a video composite capturing inversion-induced discrepancies, and (ii) an audio-visual cross-attention feature reflecting modality alignment enforced during generation. To enable faithful cross-generator evaluation, we further introduce MMDF, a new multimodal deepfake dataset spanning diverse manipulation types and rapidly evolving synthesis paradigms, including GANs, diffusion, and flow-matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-AVDT achieves leading performance on MMDF and generalizes strongly to external benchmarks and unseen generators, outperforming existing methods with accuracy improved by 13.1%. Our findings highlight the importance of leveraging internal audio-visual consistency cues for robustness to future generators in deepfake detection.

Pixels Don't Lie (But Your Detector Might): Bootstrapping MLLM-as-a-Judge for Trustworthy Deepfake Detection and Reasoning Supervision

Deepfake detection models often generate natural-language explanations, yet their reasoning is frequently ungrounded in visual evidence, limiting reliability. Existing evaluations measure classification accuracy but overlook reasoning fidelity. We propose DeepfakeJudge, a framework for scalable reasoning supervision and evaluation, that integrates an out-of-distribution benchmark containing recent generative and editing forgeries, a human-annotated subset with visual reasoning labels, and a suite of evaluation models, that specialize in evaluating reasoning rationales without the need for explicit ground truth reasoning rationales. The Judge is optimized through a bootstrapped generator-evaluator process that scales human feedback into structured reasoning supervision and supports both pointwise and pairwise evaluation. On the proposed meta-evaluation benchmark, our reasoning-bootstrapped model achieves an accuracy of 96.2\%, outperforming \texttt{30x} larger baselines. The reasoning judge attains very high correlation with human ratings and 98.9\% percent pairwise agreement on the human-annotated meta-evaluation subset. These results establish reasoning fidelity as a quantifiable dimension of deepfake detection and demonstrate scalable supervision for interpretable deepfake reasoning. Our user study shows that participants preferred the reasonings generated by our framework 70\% of the time, in terms of faithfulness, groundedness, and usefulness, compared to those produced by other models and datasets. All of our datasets, models, and codebase are \href{https://github.com/KjAeRsTuIsK/DeepfakeJudge}{open-sourced}.

Deepfake Synthesis vs. Detection: An Uneven Contest

The rapid advancement of deepfake technology has significantly elevated the realism and accessibility of synthetic media. Emerging techniques, such as diffusion-based models and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), alongside enhancements in traditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have contributed to the sophisticated generation of deepfake videos. Concurrently, deepfake detection methods have seen notable progress, driven by innovations in Transformer architectures, contrastive learning, and other machine learning approaches. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis of state-of-the-art deepfake detection techniques, including human evaluation experiments against cutting-edge synthesis methods. Our findings highlight a concerning trend: many state-of-the-art detection models exhibit markedly poor performance when challenged with deepfakes produced by modern synthesis techniques, including poor performance by human participants against the best quality deepfakes. Through extensive experimentation, we provide evidence that underscores the urgent need for continued refinement of detection models to keep pace with the evolving capabilities of deepfake generation technologies. This research emphasizes the critical gap between current detection methodologies and the sophistication of new generation techniques, calling for intensified efforts in this crucial area of study.

HyperPotter: Spell the Charm of High-Order Interactions in Audio Deepfake Detection

Advances in AIGC technologies have enabled the synthesis of highly realistic audio deepfakes capable of deceiving human auditory perception. Although numerous audio deepfake detection (ADD) methods have been developed, most rely on local temporal/spectral features or pairwise relations, overlooking high-order interactions (HOIs). HOIs capture discriminative patterns that emerge from multiple feature components beyond their individual contributions. We propose HyperPotter, a hypergraph-based framework that explicitly models these synergistic HOIs through clustering-based hyperedges with class-aware prototype initialization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyperPotter surpasses its baseline by an average relative gain of 22.15% across 11 datasets and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 13.96% on 4 challenging cross-domain datasets, demonstrating superior generalization to diverse attacks and speakers.

Seeing, Hearing, and Knowing Together: Multimodal Strategies in Deepfake Videos Detection

As deepfake videos become increasingly difficult for people to recognise, understanding the strategies humans use is key to designing effective media literacy interventions. We conducted a study with 195 participants between the ages of 21 and 40, who judged real and deepfake videos, rated their confidence, and reported the cues they relied on across visual, audio, and knowledge strategies. Participants were more accurate with real videos than with deepfakes and showed lower expected calibration error for real content. Through association rule mining, we identified cue combinations that shaped performance. Visual appearance, vocal, and intuition often co-occurred for successful identifications, which highlights the importance of multimodal approaches in human detection. Our findings show which cues help or hinder detection and suggest directions for designing media literacy tools that guide effective cue use. Building on these insights can help people improve their identification skills and become more resilient to deceptive digital media.