A Multi-Domain Feature Fusion Framework for Generalizable Deepfake Detection Across Different Generators
Authors: Amna Amjid, Sana Qadir, Mehwish Fatima, Raja Khurram Shahzad
Organizations: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan · Department of Communication, Quality Management and Information Systems, Mid Sweden University, Ostersund Campus, Sweden · Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Lulea University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden.
Deepfakes are artificially generated images, audio, or videos that threaten privacy, security, and information integrity. Detecting such content is crucial for countering disinformation, as the latest models generate highly realistic content. While spatial- or frequency-based approaches achieve good detection rates on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)-based generated deepfakes, they often struggle with recent diffusion model-generated images. In particular, existing approaches rarely exploit complementary multi-domain representations or systematically evaluate cross-generator robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-domain deepfake detection framework called SGFF-Net (Spatial-Gradient-Frequency Fusion Network) that integrates spatial, gradient, and DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform)-based frequency representations within a dual residual learning architecture. Experimental results show that the SGFF-Net achieves 98.95% accuracy in intra-dataset evaluation and improves performance in both cross-model (70.46%) and cross-paradigm (69.94%) settings. Incorporating multi-source training and data augmentation further enhances robustness, increasing accuracy from 70.46% to 79.80% in cross-model evaluation, from 69% to 78% in cross-paradigm evaluation, and from 61.50% to 75.80% on real-world data. Unlike single-domain detectors, the SGFF-Net learns complementary forensic cues across spatial, gradient, and wavelet-frequency domains, resulting in greater robustness under cross-generator and cross-paradigm evaluation. The results further show that combining multi-domain representations with data diversity and augmentation substantially improves generalization, providing practical insights for developing more reliable deepfake detection systems.
Deepfake detectors face growing challenges in generalization as new image synthesis techniques emerge. In particular, deepfakes generated by diffusion models are highly photorealistic and often evade detectors trained on GAN-based forgeries. This paper addresses the generalization problem in deepfake detection by leveraging diffusion noise characteristics. We propose an Attention-guided Noise Learning (ANL) framework that integrates a pre-trained diffusion model into the deepfake detection pipeline to guide the learning of more robust features. Specifically, our method uses the diffusion model's denoising process to expose subtle artifacts: the detector is trained to predict the noise contained in an input image at a given diffusion step, forcing it to capture discrepancies between real and synthetic images, while an attention-guided mechanism derived from the predicted noise is introduced to encourage the model to focus on globally distributed discrepancies rather than local patterns. By harnessing the frozen diffusion model's learned distribution of natural images, the ANL method acts as a form of regularization, improving the detector's generalization to unseen forgery types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ANL significantly outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy in detecting diffusion-generated deepfakes. Notably, the proposed framework boosts generalization performance (e.g., improving ACC/AP by a substantial margin on unseen models) without introducing additional overhead during inference. Our results highlight that diffusion noise provides a powerful signal for generalizable deepfake detection.
The rapid evolution of generative models has enabled the creation of hyper-realistic facial deepfakes, exposing a critical vulnerability in modern digital forensics: the inability of detectors to generalize to unseen manipulation techniques. Traditional networks suffer from representation collapse, overfitting to localized artifact fingerprints of specific training generators. This work investigates whether modern Vision Foundation Models can serve as generalizable, out-of-the-box feature extractors capable of tracking forensic anomalies across entirely unseen generative manifolds. We conduct a systematic cross-domain evaluation comparing three foundational learning paradigms: fully supervised macro-semantic features (RoPE-ViT), pure self-supervised geometric features (DINOv3), and multi-teacher agglomerative representations (NVIDIA C-RADIOv4-H). By deploying frozen backbones subjected to downstream linear probing, we map the performance limitations of these architectures on the challenging DF40 benchmark. Our empirical findings expose the intrinsic trade-offs between pre-training paradigms and parameter scale, proving that while foundation models retain high discriminative capabilities for entire face synthesis, localized face editing techniques expose fundamental boundaries in linear probe evaluation structures. Source code and model weights are available in http://github.com/mribrahim/deepfake
Deepfake generation has raised growing concerns regarding digital media authenticity, misinformation, identity fraud, and public trust. Recent studies show that combining spatial and frequency features leads to stronger detection results than using independently. This paper presents MSCA-FFT, a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based multi-scale cross-attention framework for image-level deepfake detection. The model combines a partially fine-tuned Xception spatial branch with an FFT-based frequency branch. The frequency branch processes the log-scaled FFT magnitude spectrum through shallow convolutional layers, avoiding inverse frequency-to-image reconstruction used in DCT-based pipelines. The spatial and frequency representations are refined by transformer encoders, fused through cross-attention, and passed to an MLP classifier for real/fake prediction. Experimental results show that MSCA-FFT achieves consistently higher performance than the DCT-based state-of-the-art spatial-frequency fusion method and the compared baseline models. The ablation study further indicates that the FFT-based frequency branch provides complementary spectral cues when fused with spatial features. In addition, FFT-based frequency analysis and Grad-CAM/LIME explanations show consistent evidence around manipulation-sensitive facial regions, including the eyes, mouth, nose, and facial boundaries.