Real-Time Deepfake Detection in the Real World

Bar Cavia, Eliahu Horwitz, Tal Reiss, Yedid Hoshen

Keywords: deepfake detection

Abstract: Recent improvements in generative AI made synthesizing fake images easy; as they can be used to cause harm, it is crucial to develop accurate techniques to identify them. This paper introduces "Locally Aware Deepfake Detection Algorithm" (LaDeDa), that accepts a single $9 \times 9$ image patch and outputs its deepfake score. The image deepfake score is the pooled score of its patches. With merely patch-level information, LaDeDa significantly improves over the state-of-the-art, achieving around $99\%$ mAP on current benchmarks. Owing to the patch-level structure of LaDeDa, we hypothesize that the generation artifacts can be detected by a simple model. We therefore distill LaDeDa into Tiny-LaDeDa, a highly efficient model consisting of only $4$ convolutional layers. Remarkably, Tiny-LaDeDa has $375 \times$ fewer FLOPs and is $10\text{,}000 \times$ more parameter-efficient than LaDeDa, allowing it to run efficiently on edge devices with a minor decrease in accuracy. These almost-perfect scores raise the question: is the task of deepfake detection close to being solved? Perhaps surprisingly, our investigation reveals that current training protocols prevent methods from generalizing to real-world deepfakes extracted from social media. To address this issue, we introduce WildRF, a new deepfake detection dataset curated from several popular social networks. Our method achieves the top performance of $93.7\%$ mAP on WildRF, however the large gap from perfect accuracy shows that reliable real-world deepfake detection is still unsolved.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

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Submission Number: 2581