An uncertainty-aware deepfake detection framework that identifies manipulations through inconsistencies across complementary evidence sources by introducing Inter-Branch Disagreement Calibration (IBDC), a disagreement-aware uncertainty modeling mechanism that links predictive uncertainty to conflicts among evidence streams.
Abstract
Security-critical biometric and forensic applications require accurate predictions and reliable confidence estimates, particularly under distribution shift. This challenge is especially acute for deepfake detection, where foundation-model-based detectors often exhibit overconfident predictions on out-of-distribution manipulations, which limits their suitability for operational deployment. We propose an uncertainty-aware deepfake detection framework that identifies manipulations through inconsistencies across complementary evidence sources. The framework integrates three streams: a visual stream based on an adapted CLIP encoder, a semantic stream that models consistency among facial attributes through differentiable constraints, and a structural stream that captures class-dependent dependency patterns between semantic and forensic features. To effectively combine these signals, we introduce Inter-Branch Disagreement Calibration (IBDC), a disagreement-aware uncertainty modeling mechanism that links predictive uncertainty to conflicts among evidence streams. Extensive cross-dataset experiments using FaceForensics++ as the training source demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art generalization across multiple out-of-distribution benchmarks while consistently improving calibration and selective prediction performance. These results show that combining complementary evidence with disagreement-aware uncertainty provides a robust foundation for trustworthy and well-calibrated deepfake detection under distribution shift.
DeepFakeBuster is presented as a confidence-calibrated adaptive ensemble for deepfake image detection by fusing together heterogeneous deep learning models built around detecting complementary forensic cues e.g., spatial inconsistencies, boundary artifacts, noise residuals, semantic consistency, and frequency-domain features.
Rachana Patil, R. Shinde, S. Patil et al.· Scientific Reports· 0 citations
Recent generative models can produce images with few obvious visual artifacts, weakening detectors and explanations that rely only on surface appearance. We present LaP-Forensics, a multimodal framework that augments RGB semantics with reconstruction-based forensic evidence. A frozen Stable Diffusion DDIM inversion-reconstruction model provides a fixed reconstruction reference, and its residual map measures local compatibility with that reference. Independent projectors encode the RGB image and residual map before a structured Where-What-Why model predicts a textual analysis and an artifact mask.Supervised fine-tuning is followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), whose reward combines mask overlap with output-structure and evidence-reference terms. These text-side terms encourage the model to refer to the consistency map but do not constitute a verifier of free-form textual truth. A separate image-level head fuses RGB and DDIM-residual class features. Experiments show cross-generator detection on UniversalFakeDetect and competitive artifact localization on the official SynthScars benchmark. Controlled cue-construction, inversion-horizon, component, reward-term, and counterfactual analyses support the utility of the residual stream under the evaluated settings, while free-form textual faithfulness and reliability under post-processing remain open limitations.
Can Wang, Yuhao Wang, Yushe Cao et al.· arXiv.org· 1 citation
A generative detector that localizes tampering by estimating the local restoration cost required to align a query image with authentic visual-text statistics, rather than by learning forgery-specific decision boundaries is proposed, and Sparse-Constraint Rectified Flow is introduced, a detector-oriented adaptation of Flow Matching for spatially sparse anomaly localization.
Jiangling Zhang, Shuxuan Gao, Zeyu Chen et al.· 0 citations
The growing realism and accessibility of manipulated and generated faces threaten the trustworthiness of digital media. To detect such forgeries, deepfake detectors based on vision foundation models have shown promising performance, but they typically rely on a single pretrained representation and are prone to overfitting to particular training distributions. To improve generalization to unseen forgeries, we propose UCF-Net, an uncertainty-aware cascaded fusion network that harnesses CLIP's language-aligned semantic priors and DINO's self-supervised visual-structure priors. UCF-Net extracts hierarchical features across Transformer depths, uses layer-wise expert aggregation to adaptively combine each encoder's multi-level cues, and performs weighted fusion of the resulting representations based on entropy-derived uncertainty. We further consolidate public deepfake datasets into a unified benchmark of approximately 4M images and construct a separate cross-generator evaluation set with over 8K face images from eight recent generators. On the unified benchmark, UCF-Net achieves the best mean AUC among the evaluated methods in both in-domain and cross-domain evaluations. On the cross-generator set, it adapts effectively with limited target-domain data, although zero-shot transfer remains challenging.
Although recent deepfake detectors achieve high overall accuracy, their errors remain unevenly distributed across demographic subgroups, with real faces from certain groups more often misclassified as fake. Existing fairness-aware detectors typically regularise the entire feature representation, without identifying or controlling the specific components that drive unfair predictions. Such coarse intervention can over-suppress useful forgery cues while leaving demographic structure in component-specific subspaces. To address this, we identify two subgroup-sensitive components: multi-scale spatial features, which encode local facial and forgery patterns, and fine-tuning-induced residual features, which adapt the backbone to the unfair training distribution. We propose FairReL, a fairness-aware representation-learning framework that targets both components with dedicated demographic supervision. FairReL uses an SVD-decomposed foundation-model backbone to isolate the fine-tuning-induced residual representation, and introduces two complementary losses. Group-Conditional Wavelet Decorrelation (GCWD) suppresses subgroup-imbalanced structure across spatial wavelet sub-bands, while Subspace-Localised Mean Alignment (SLMA) aligns subgroup means within each real/fake class in the residual representation. Experiments on FF++, Celeb-DF, DFD and DFDC show that, against the state-of-the-art fairness-aware detector, FairReL improves unseen-dataset AUC by 3.9% while reducing subgroup FPR disparity by 10.2%. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaoman89/FairReL .
Xiaoman Lu, Jiaqi Li, Shuntian Zheng et al.· 0 citations
This work proposes an innovative Environment-Invariant Subspace Learning (EISL) framework, which aims to disentangle features into orthogonal forgery-relevant invariant factors and environment-related residual factors via a learnable low-rank projection and designs an Environmental Intervention module that generates diverse and challenging intervention pairs.
Shenghao Chen, Hao Jia, Chen Li et al.· 0 citations
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