Deepfake Detection via Joint Unsupervised Reconstruction and Supervised Classification

TL;DR

This paper introduces a joint unsupervised reconstruction and supervised classification approach using a two-branch Convolutional AutoEncoder for deepfake detection, significantly improving cross-dataset generalization.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two-branch CAE model that combines reconstruction and classification tasks to enhance deepfake detection and generalizability across datasets.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on three datasets.

Significantly improves cross-dataset detection performance.

Enhances feature representation through joint learning.

Abstract

Deep learning has enabled realistic face manipulation (i.e., deepfake), which poses significant concerns over the integrity of the media in circulation. Most existing deep learning techniques for deepfake detection can achieve promising performance in the intra-dataset evaluation setting (i.e., training and testing on the same dataset), but are unable to perform satisfactorily in the inter-dataset evaluation setting (i.e., training on one dataset and testing on another). Most of the previous methods use the backbone network to extract global features for making predictions and only employ binary supervision (i.e., indicating whether the training instances are fake or authentic) to train the network. Classification merely based on the learning of global features leads often leads to weak generalizability to unseen manipulation methods. In addition, the reconstruction task can improve the learned representations. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for deepfake detection, which considers the reconstruction and classification tasks simultaneously to address these problems. This method shares the information learned by one task with the other, which focuses on a different aspect other existing works rarely consider and hence boosts the overall performance. In particular, we design a two-branch Convolutional AutoEncoder (CAE), in which the Convolutional Encoder used to compress the feature map into the latent representation is shared by both branches. Then the latent representation of the input data is fed to a simple classifier and the unsupervised reconstruction component simultaneously. Our network is trained end-to-end. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three commonly-used datasets, particularly in the cross-dataset evaluation setting.