Visual Watermarking in the Era of Diffusion Models: Advances and Challenges

As generative artificial intelligence technologies like Stable Diffusion advance, visual content becomes more vulnerable to misuse, raising concerns about copyright infringement. Visual watermarks serve as effective protection mechanisms, asserting ownership and deterring unauthorized use. Traditional deepfake detection methods often rely on passive techniques that struggle with sophisticated manipulations. In contrast, diffusion models enhance detection accuracy by allowing for the effective learning of features, enabling the embedding of imperceptible and robust watermarks. We analyze the strengths and challenges of watermark techniques related to diffusion models, focusing on their robustness and application in watermark generation. By exploring the integration of advanced diffusion models and watermarking security, we aim to advance the discourse on preserving watermark robustness against evolving forgery threats. It emphasizes the critical importance of developing innovative solutions to protect digital content and ensure the preservation of ownership rights in the era of generative AI.

TT-DF: A Large-Scale Diffusion-Based Dataset and Benchmark for Human Body Forgery Detection

The emergence and popularity of facial deepfake methods spur the vigorous development of deepfake datasets and facial forgery detection, which to some extent alleviates the security concerns about facial-related artificial intelligence technologies. However, when it comes to human body forgery, there has been a persistent lack of datasets and detection methods, due to the later inception and complexity of human body generation methods. To mitigate this issue, we introduce TikTok-DeepFake (TT-DF), a novel large-scale diffusion-based dataset containing 6,120 forged videos with 1,378,857 synthetic frames, specifically tailored for body forgery detection. TT-DF offers a wide variety of forgery methods, involving multiple advanced human image animation models utilized for manipulation, two generative configurations based on the disentanglement of identity and pose information, as well as different compressed versions. The aim is to simulate any potential unseen forged data in the wild as comprehensively as possible, and we also furnish a benchmark on TT-DF. Additionally, we propose an adapted body forgery detection model, Temporal Optical Flow Network (TOF-Net), which exploits the spatiotemporal inconsistencies and optical flow distribution differences between natural data and forged data. Our experiments demonstrate that TOF-Net achieves favorable performance on TT-DF, outperforming current state-of-the-art extendable facial forgery detection models. For our TT-DF dataset, please refer to https://github.com/HashTAG00002/TT-DF.

FauForensics: Boosting Audio-Visual Deepfake Detection with Facial Action Units

The rapid evolution of generative AI has increased the threat of realistic audio-visual deepfakes, demanding robust detection methods. Existing solutions primarily address unimodal (audio or visual) forgeries but struggle with multimodal manipulations due to inadequate handling of heterogeneous modality features and poor generalization across datasets. To this end, we propose a novel framework called FauForensics by introducing biologically invariant facial action units (FAUs), which is a quantitative descriptor of facial muscle activity linked to emotion physiology. It serves as forgery-resistant representations that reduce domain dependency while capturing subtle dynamics often disrupted in synthetic content. Besides, instead of comparing entire video clips as in prior works, our method computes fine-grained frame-wise audiovisual similarities via a dedicated fusion module augmented with learnable cross-modal queries. It dynamically aligns temporal-spatial lip-audio relationships while mitigating multi-modal feature heterogeneity issues. Experiments on FakeAVCeleb and LAV-DF show state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and superior cross-dataset generalizability with up to an average of 4.83\% than existing methods.

DFA-CON: A Contrastive Learning Approach for Detecting Copyright Infringement in DeepFake Art

Recent proliferation of generative AI tools for visual content creation-particularly in the context of visual artworks-has raised serious concerns about copyright infringement and forgery. The large-scale datasets used to train these models often contain a mixture of copyrighted and non-copyrighted artworks. Given the tendency of generative models to memorize training patterns, they are susceptible to varying degrees of copyright violation. Building on the recently proposed DeepfakeArt Challenge benchmark, this work introduces DFA-CON, a contrastive learning framework designed to detect copyright-infringing or forged AI-generated art. DFA-CON learns a discriminative representation space, posing affinity among original artworks and their forged counterparts within a contrastive learning framework. The model is trained across multiple attack types, including inpainting, style transfer, adversarial perturbation, and cutmix. Evaluation results demonstrate robust detection performance across most attack types, outperforming recent pretrained foundation models. Code and model checkpoints will be released publicly upon acceptance.

LAMM-ViT: AI Face Detection via Layer-Aware Modulation of Region-Guided Attention

Detecting AI-synthetic faces presents a critical challenge: it is hard to capture consistent structural relationships between facial regions across diverse generation techniques. Current methods, which focus on specific artifacts rather than fundamental inconsistencies, often fail when confronted with novel generative models. To address this limitation, we introduce Layer-aware Mask Modulation Vision Transformer (LAMM-ViT), a Vision Transformer designed for robust facial forgery detection. This model integrates distinct Region-Guided Multi-Head Attention (RG-MHA) and Layer-aware Mask Modulation (LAMM) components within each layer. RG-MHA utilizes facial landmarks to create regional attention masks, guiding the model to scrutinize architectural inconsistencies across different facial areas. Crucially, the separate LAMM module dynamically generates layer-specific parameters, including mask weights and gating values, based on network context. These parameters then modulate the behavior of RG-MHA, enabling adaptive adjustment of regional focus across network depths. This architecture facilitates the capture of subtle, hierarchical forgery cues ubiquitous among diverse generation techniques, such as GANs and Diffusion Models. In cross-model generalization tests, LAMM-ViT demonstrates superior performance, achieving 94.09% mean ACC (a +5.45% improvement over SoTA) and 98.62% mean AP (a +3.09% improvement). These results demonstrate LAMM-ViT's exceptional ability to generalize and its potential for reliable deployment against evolving synthetic media threats.

Beyond Identity: A Generalizable Approach for Deepfake Audio Detection

Deepfake audio presents a growing threat to digital security, due to its potential for social engineering, fraud, and identity misuse. However, existing detection models suffer from poor generalization across datasets, due to implicit identity leakage, where models inadvertently learn speaker-specific features instead of manipulation artifacts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explicitly analyze and address identity leakage in the audio deepfake detection domain. This work proposes an identity-independent audio deepfake detection framework that mitigates identity leakage by encouraging the model to focus on forgery-specific artifacts instead of overfitting to speaker traits. Our approach leverages Artifact Detection Modules (ADMs) to isolate synthetic artifacts in both time and frequency domains, enhancing cross-dataset generalization. We introduce novel dynamic artifact generation techniques, including frequency domain swaps, time domain manipulations, and background noise augmentation, to enforce learning of dataset-invariant features. Extensive experiments conducted on ASVspoof2019, ADD 2022, FoR, and In-The-Wild datasets demonstrate that the proposed ADM-enhanced models achieve F1 scores of 0.230 (ADD 2022), 0.604 (FoR), and 0.813 (In-The-Wild), consistently outperforming the baseline. Dynamic Frequency Swap proves to be the most effective strategy across diverse conditions. These findings emphasize the value of artifact-based learning in mitigating implicit identity leakage for more generalizable audio deepfake detection.

Cross-Branch Orthogonality for Improved Generalization in Face Deepfake Detection

Remarkable advancements in generative AI technology have given rise to a spectrum of novel deepfake categories with unprecedented leaps in their realism, and deepfakes are increasingly becoming a nuisance to law enforcement authorities and the general public. In particular, we observe alarming levels of confusion, deception, and loss of faith regarding multimedia content within society caused by face deepfakes, and existing deepfake detectors are struggling to keep up with the pace of improvements in deepfake generation. This is primarily due to their reliance on specific forgery artifacts, which limits their ability to generalise and detect novel deepfake types. To combat the spread of malicious face deepfakes, this paper proposes a new strategy that leverages coarse-to-fine spatial information, semantic information, and their interactions while ensuring feature distinctiveness and reducing the redundancy of the modelled features. A novel feature orthogonality-based disentanglement strategy is introduced to ensure branch-level and cross-branch feature disentanglement, which allows us to integrate multiple feature vectors without adding complexity to the feature space or compromising generalisation. Comprehensive experiments on three public benchmarks: FaceForensics++, Celeb-DF, and the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) show that these design choices enable the proposed approach to outperform current state-of-the-art methods by 5% on the Celeb-DF dataset and 7% on the DFDC dataset in a cross-dataset evaluation setting.

Learning Real Facial Concepts for Independent Deepfake Detection

Deepfake detection models often struggle with generalization to unseen datasets, manifesting as misclassifying real instances as fake in target domains. This is primarily due to an overreliance on forgery artifacts and a limited understanding of real faces. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach RealID to enhance generalization by learning a comprehensive concept of real faces while assessing the probabilities of belonging to the real and fake classes independently. RealID comprises two key modules: the Real Concept Capture Module (RealC2) and the Independent Dual-Decision Classifier (IDC). With the assistance of a MultiReal Memory, RealC2 maintains various prototypes for real faces, allowing the model to capture a comprehensive concept of real class. Meanwhile, IDC redefines the classification strategy by making independent decisions based on the concept of the real class and the presence of forgery artifacts. Through the combined effect of the above modules, the influence of forgery-irrelevant patterns is alleviated, and extensive experiments on five widely used datasets demonstrate that RealID significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 1.74% improvement in average accuracy.

DATA: Multi-Disentanglement based Contrastive Learning for Open-World Semi-Supervised Deepfake Attribution

Deepfake attribution (DFA) aims to perform multiclassification on different facial manipulation techniques, thereby mitigating the detrimental effects of forgery content on the social order and personal reputations. However, previous methods focus only on method-specific clues, which easily lead to overfitting, while overlooking the crucial role of common forgery features. Additionally, they struggle to distinguish between uncertain novel classes in more practical open-world scenarios. To address these issues, in this paper we propose an innovative multi-DisentAnglement based conTrastive leArning framework, DATA, to enhance the generalization ability on novel classes for the open-world semi-supervised deepfake attribution (OSS-DFA) task. Specifically, since all generation techniques can be abstracted into a similar architecture, DATA defines the concept of 'Orthonormal Deepfake Basis' for the first time and utilizes it to disentangle method-specific features, thereby reducing the overfitting on forgery-irrelevant information. Furthermore, an augmented-memory mechanism is designed to assist in novel class discovery and contrastive learning, which aims to obtain clear class boundaries for the novel classes through instance-level disentanglements. Additionally, to enhance the standardization and discrimination of features, DATA uses bases contrastive loss and center contrastive loss as auxiliaries for the aforementioned modules. Extensive experimental evaluations show that DATA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OSS-DFA benchmark, e.g., there are notable accuracy improvements in 2.55% / 5.7% under different settings, compared with the existing methods.

MLLM-Enhanced Face Forgery Detection: A Vision-Language Fusion Solution

Reliable face forgery detection algorithms are crucial for countering the growing threat of deepfake-driven disinformation. Previous research has demonstrated the potential of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in identifying manipulated faces. However, existing methods typically depend on either the Large Language Model (LLM) alone or an external detector to generate classification results, which often leads to sub-optimal integration of visual and textual modalities. In this paper, we propose VLF-FFD, a novel Vision-Language Fusion solution for MLLM-enhanced Face Forgery Detection. Our key contributions are twofold. First, we present EFF++, a frame-level, explainability-driven extension of the widely used FaceForensics++ (FF++) dataset. In EFF++, each manipulated video frame is paired with a textual annotation that describes both the forgery artifacts and the specific manipulation technique applied, enabling more effective and informative MLLM training. Second, we design a Vision-Language Fusion Network (VLF-Net) that promotes bidirectional interaction between visual and textual features, supported by a three-stage training pipeline to fully leverage its potential. VLF-FFD achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both cross-dataset and intra-dataset evaluations, underscoring its exceptional effectiveness in face forgery detection.