Performance Decay in Deepfake Detection: The Limitations of Training on Outdated Data

The continually advancing quality of deepfake technology exacerbates the threats of disinformation, fraud, and harassment by making maliciously-generated synthetic content increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality. We introduce a simple yet effective two-stage detection method that achieves an AUROC of over 99.8% on contemporary deepfakes. However, this high performance is short-lived. We show that models trained on this data suffer a recall drop of over 30% when evaluated on deepfakes created with generation techniques from just six months later, demonstrating significant decay as threats evolve. Our analysis reveals two key insights for robust detection. Firstly, continued performance requires the ongoing curation of large, diverse datasets. Second, predictive power comes primarily from static, frame-level artifacts, not temporal inconsistencies. The future of effective deepfake detection therefore depends on rapid data collection and the development of advanced frame-level feature detectors.

A Self-Supervised Framework for Space Object Behaviour Characterisation

Foundation Models, pre-trained on large unlabelled datasets before task-specific fine-tuning, are increasingly being applied to specialised domains. Recent examples include ClimaX for climate and Clay for satellite Earth observation, but a Foundation Model for Space Object Behavioural Analysis has not yet been developed. As orbital populations grow, automated methods for characterising space object behaviour are crucial for space safety. We present a Space Safety and Sustainability Foundation Model focusing on space object behavioural analysis using light curves (LCs). We implemented a Perceiver-Variational Autoencoder (VAE) architecture, pre-trained with self-supervised reconstruction and masked reconstruction on 227,000 LCs from the MMT-9 observatory. The VAE enables anomaly detection, motion prediction, and LC generation. We fine-tuned the model for anomaly detection & motion prediction using two independent LC simulators (CASSANDRA and GRIAL respectively), using CAD models of boxwing, Sentinel-3, SMOS, and Starlink platforms. Our pre-trained model achieved a reconstruction error of 0.01%, identifying potentially anomalous light curves through reconstruction difficulty. After fine-tuning, the model scored 88% and 82% accuracy, with 0.90 and 0.95 ROC AUC scores respectively in both anomaly detection and motion mode prediction (sun-pointing, spin, etc.). Analysis of high-confidence anomaly predictions on real data revealed distinct patterns including characteristic object profiles and satellite glinting. Here, we demonstrate how self-supervised learning can simultaneously enable anomaly detection, motion prediction, and synthetic data generation from rich representations learned in pre-training. Our work therefore supports space safety and sustainability through automated monitoring and simulation capabilities.