A Quality-Centric Framework for Generic Deepfake Detection

This paper addresses the generalization issue in deepfake detection by harnessing forgery quality in training data. Generally, the forgery quality of different deepfakes varies: some have easily recognizable forgery clues, while others are highly realistic. Existing works often train detectors on a mix of deepfakes with varying forgery qualities, potentially leading detectors to short-cut the easy-to-spot artifacts from low-quality forgery samples, thereby hurting generalization performance. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel quality-centric framework for generic deepfake detection, which is composed of a Quality Evaluator, a low-quality data enhancement module, and a learning pacing strategy that explicitly incorporates forgery quality into the training process. The framework is inspired by curriculum learning, which is designed to gradually enable the detector to learn more challenging deepfake samples, starting with easier samples and progressing to more realistic ones. We employ both static and dynamic assessments to assess the forgery quality, combining their scores to produce a final rating for each training sample. The rating score guides the selection of deepfake samples for training, with higher-rated samples having a higher probability of being chosen. Furthermore, we propose a novel frequency data augmentation method specifically designed for low-quality forgery samples, which helps to reduce obvious forgery traces and improve their overall realism. Extensive experiments show that our method can be applied in a plug-and-play manner and significantly enhance the generalization performance.

SAFE: Slow and Fast Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Continual Learning with Pre-Trained Models

Continual learning aims to incrementally acquire new concepts in data streams while resisting forgetting previous knowledge. With the rise of powerful pre-trained models (PTMs), there is a growing interest in training incremental learning systems using these foundation models, rather than learning from scratch. Existing works often view PTMs as a strong initial point and directly apply parameter-efficient tuning (PET) in the first session for adapting to downstream tasks. In the following sessions, most methods freeze model parameters for tackling forgetting issues. However, applying PET directly to downstream data cannot fully explore the inherent knowledge in PTMs. Additionally, freezing the parameters in incremental sessions hinders models' plasticity to novel concepts not covered in the first session. To solve the above issues, we propose a Slow And Fast parameter-Efficient tuning (SAFE) framework. In particular, to inherit general knowledge from foundation models, we include a transfer loss function by measuring the correlation between the PTM and the PET-applied model. After calibrating in the first session, the slow efficient tuning parameters can capture more informative features, improving generalization to incoming classes. Moreover, to further incorporate novel concepts, we strike a balance between stability and plasticity by fixing slow efficient tuning parameters and continuously updating the fast ones. Specifically, a cross-classification loss with feature alignment is proposed to circumvent catastrophic forgetting. During inference, we introduce an entropy-based aggregation strategy to dynamically utilize the complementarity in the slow and fast learners. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method by significantly surpassing the state-of-the-art.

Decoupled Data Augmentation for Improving Image Classification

Recent advancements in image mixing and generative data augmentation have shown promise in enhancing image classification. However, these techniques face the challenge of balancing semantic fidelity with diversity. Specifically, image mixing involves interpolating two images to create a new one, but this pixel-level interpolation can compromise fidelity. Generative augmentation uses text-to-image generative models to synthesize or modify images, often limiting diversity to avoid generating out-of-distribution data that potentially affects accuracy. We propose that this fidelity-diversity dilemma partially stems from the whole-image paradigm of existing methods. Since an image comprises the class-dependent part (CDP) and the class-independent part (CIP), where each part has fundamentally different impacts on the image's fidelity, treating different parts uniformly can therefore be misleading. To address this fidelity-diversity dilemma, we introduce Decoupled Data Augmentation (De-DA), which resolves the dilemma by separating images into CDPs and CIPs and handling them adaptively. To maintain fidelity, we use generative models to modify real CDPs under controlled conditions, preserving semantic consistency. To enhance diversity, we replace the image's CIP with inter-class variants, creating diverse CDP-CIP combinations. Additionally, we implement an online randomized combination strategy during training to generate numerous distinct CDP-CIP combinations cost-effectively. Comprehensive empirical evaluations validate the effectiveness of our method.

TAS: Distilling Arbitrary Teacher and Student via a Hybrid Assistant

Most knowledge distillation (KD) methodologies predominantly focus on teacher-student pairs with similar architectures, such as both being convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the potential and flexibility of KD can be greatly improved by expanding it to novel Cross-Architecture KD (CAKD), where the knowledge of homogeneous and heterogeneous teachers can be transferred flexibly to a given student. The primary challenge in CAKD lies in the substantial feature gaps between heterogeneous models, originating from the distinction of their inherent inductive biases and module functions. To this end, we introduce an assistant model as a bridge to facilitate smooth feature knowledge transfer between heterogeneous teachers and students. More importantly, within our proposed design principle, the assistant model combines the advantages of cross-architecture inductive biases and module functions by merging convolution and attention modules derived from both student and teacher module functions. Furthermore, we observe that heterogeneous features exhibit diverse spatial distributions in CAKD, hindering the effectiveness of conventional pixel-wise mean squared error (MSE) loss. Therefore, we leverage a spatial-agnostic InfoNCE loss to align features after spatial smoothing, thereby improving the feature alignments in CAKD. Our proposed method is evaluated across some homogeneous model pairs and arbitrary heterogeneous combinations of CNNs, ViTs, and MLPs, achieving state-of-the-art performance for distilled models with a maximum gain of 11.47% on CIFAR-100 and 3.67% on ImageNet-1K. Our code and models will be released.

LLaCA: Multimodal Large Language Continual Assistant

Instruction tuning guides the Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in aligning different modalities by designing text instructions, which seems to be an essential technique to enhance the capabilities and controllability of foundation models. In this framework, Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) is adopted to continually instruct MLLMs to follow human intent in sequential datasets. We observe existing gradient update would heavily destroy the tuning performance on previous datasets and the zero-shot ability during continual instruction tuning. Exponential Moving Average (EMA) update policy owns the ability to trace previous parameters, which can aid in decreasing forgetting. However, its stable balance weight cannot deal with the ever-changing datasets, leading to the out-of-balance between plasticity and stability of MLLMs. In this paper, we propose a method called Multimodal Large Language Continual Assistant (LLaCA) to address the challenge. Starting from the trade-off prerequisite and EMA update, we propose the plasticity and stability ideal condition. Based on Taylor expansion in the loss function, we find the optimal balance weight is basically according to the gradient information and previous parameters. We automatically determine the balance weight and significantly improve the performance. Through comprehensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5 in a continual visual-question-answering benchmark, compared with baseline, our approach not only highly improves anti-forgetting ability (with reducing forgetting from 22.67 to 2.68), but also significantly promotes continual tuning performance (with increasing average accuracy from 41.31 to 61.89). Our code will be published soon.

DiffusionFake: Enhancing Generalization in Deepfake Detection via Guided Stable Diffusion

The rapid progress of Deepfake technology has made face swapping highly realistic, raising concerns about the malicious use of fabricated facial content. Existing methods often struggle to generalize to unseen domains due to the diverse nature of facial manipulations. In this paper, we revisit the generation process and identify a universal principle: Deepfake images inherently contain information from both source and target identities, while genuine faces maintain a consistent identity. Building upon this insight, we introduce DiffusionFake, a novel plug-and-play framework that reverses the generative process of face forgeries to enhance the generalization of detection models. DiffusionFake achieves this by injecting the features extracted by the detection model into a frozen pre-trained Stable Diffusion model, compelling it to reconstruct the corresponding target and source images. This guided reconstruction process constrains the detection network to capture the source and target related features to facilitate the reconstruction, thereby learning rich and disentangled representations that are more resilient to unseen forgeries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffusionFake significantly improves cross-domain generalization of various detector architectures without introducing additional parameters during inference. Our Codes are available in https://github.com/skJack/DiffusionFake.git.

ID$^3$: Identity-Preserving-yet-Diversified Diffusion Models for Synthetic Face Recognition

Synthetic face recognition (SFR) aims to generate synthetic face datasets that mimic the distribution of real face data, which allows for training face recognition models in a privacy-preserving manner. Despite the remarkable potential of diffusion models in image generation, current diffusion-based SFR models struggle with generalization to real-world faces. To address this limitation, we outline three key objectives for SFR: (1) promoting diversity across identities (inter-class diversity), (2) ensuring diversity within each identity by injecting various facial attributes (intra-class diversity), and (3) maintaining identity consistency within each identity group (intra-class identity preservation). Inspired by these goals, we introduce a diffusion-fueled SFR model termed $\text{ID}^3$. $\text{ID}^3$ employs an ID-preserving loss to generate diverse yet identity-consistent facial appearances. Theoretically, we show that minimizing this loss is equivalent to maximizing the lower bound of an adjusted conditional log-likelihood over ID-preserving data. This equivalence motivates an ID-preserving sampling algorithm, which operates over an adjusted gradient vector field, enabling the generation of fake face recognition datasets that approximate the distribution of real-world faces. Extensive experiments across five challenging benchmarks validate the advantages of $\text{ID}^3$.

Generalizing Deepfake Video Detection with Plug-and-Play: Video-Level Blending and Spatiotemporal Adapter Tuning

Three key challenges hinder the development of current deepfake video detection: (1) Temporal features can be complex and diverse: how can we identify general temporal artifacts to enhance model generalization? (2) Spatiotemporal models often lean heavily on one type of artifact and ignore the other: how can we ensure balanced learning from both? (3) Videos are naturally resource-intensive: how can we tackle efficiency without compromising accuracy? This paper attempts to tackle the three challenges jointly. First, inspired by the notable generality of using image-level blending data for image forgery detection, we investigate whether and how video-level blending can be effective in video. We then perform a thorough analysis and identify a previously underexplored temporal forgery artifact: Facial Feature Drift (FFD), which commonly exists across different forgeries. To reproduce FFD, we then propose a novel Video-level Blending data (VB), where VB is implemented by blending the original image and its warped version frame-by-frame, serving as a hard negative sample to mine more general artifacts. Second, we carefully design a lightweight Spatiotemporal Adapter (StA) to equip a pretrained image model (both ViTs and CNNs) with the ability to capture both spatial and temporal features jointly and efficiently. StA is designed with two-stream 3D-Conv with varying kernel sizes, allowing it to process spatial and temporal features separately. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods; and show our approach can generalize well to previously unseen forgery videos, even the just-released (in 2024) SoTAs. We release our code and pretrained weights at \url{https://github.com/YZY-stack/StA4Deepfake}.

SlerpFace: Face Template Protection via Spherical Linear Interpolation

Contemporary face recognition systems use feature templates extracted from face images to identify persons. To enhance privacy, face template protection techniques are widely employed to conceal sensitive identity and appearance information stored in the template. This paper identifies an emerging privacy attack form utilizing diffusion models that could nullify prior protection, referred to as inversion attacks. The attack can synthesize high-quality, identity-preserving face images from templates, revealing persons' appearance. Based on studies of the diffusion model's generative capability, this paper proposes a defense to deteriorate the attack, by rotating templates to a noise-like distribution. This is achieved efficiently by spherically and linearly interpolating templates, or slerp, on their located hypersphere. This paper further proposes to group-wisely divide and drop out templates' feature dimensions, to enhance the irreversibility of rotated templates. The division of groups and dropouts within each group are learned in a recognition-favored way. The proposed techniques are concretized as a novel face template protection technique, SlerpFace. Extensive experiments show that SlerpFace provides satisfactory recognition accuracy and comprehensive privacy protection against inversion and other attack forms, superior to prior arts.

DF40: Toward Next-Generation Deepfake Detection

We propose a new comprehensive benchmark to revolutionize the current deepfake detection field to the next generation. Predominantly, existing works identify top-notch detection algorithms and models by adhering to the common practice: training detectors on one specific dataset (e.g., FF++) and testing them on other prevalent deepfake datasets. This protocol is often regarded as a "golden compass" for navigating SoTA detectors. But can these stand-out "winners" be truly applied to tackle the myriad of realistic and diverse deepfakes lurking in the real world? If not, what underlying factors contribute to this gap? In this work, we found the dataset (both train and test) can be the "primary culprit" due to: (1) forgery diversity: Deepfake techniques are commonly referred to as both face forgery (face-swapping and face-reenactment) and entire image synthesis (AIGC). Most existing datasets only contain partial types, with limited forgery methods implemented; (2) forgery realism: The dominant training dataset, FF++, contains old forgery techniques from the past five years. "Honing skills" on these forgeries makes it difficult to guarantee effective detection of nowadays' SoTA deepfakes; (3) evaluation protocol: Most detection works perform evaluations on one type, e.g., train and test on face-swapping only, which hinders the development of universal deepfake detectors. To address this dilemma, we construct a highly diverse and large-scale deepfake dataset called DF40, which comprises 40 distinct deepfake techniques. We then conduct comprehensive evaluations using 4 standard evaluation protocols and 7 representative detectors, resulting in over 2,000 evaluations. Through these evaluations, we analyze from various perspectives, leading to 12 new insightful findings contributing to the field. We also open up 5 valuable yet previously underexplored research questions to inspire future works.