AvatarShield: Visual Reinforcement Learning for Human-Centric Synthetic Video Detection

TL;DR

AvatarShield is a multimodal detection framework that leverages reasoning capabilities of LLMs and a novel benchmark to identify full-body synthetic videos, addressing limitations of existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces AvatarShield, a novel multimodal detection approach that eliminates dense supervision and combines semantic and artifact analysis for human-centric synthetic video detection.

Findings

Outperforms existing detection methods in various settings

Effective in cross-domain synthetic video detection

Introduces FakeHumanVid benchmark with 15K videos

Abstract

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence Generated Content have led to highly realistic synthetic videos, particularly in human-centric scenarios involving speech, gestures, and full-body motion, posing serious threats to information authenticity and public trust. Unlike DeepFake techniques that focus on localized facial manipulation, human-centric video generation methods can synthesize entire human bodies with controllable movements, enabling complex interactions with environments, objects, and even other people. However, existing detection methods largely overlook the growing risks posed by such full-body synthetic content. Meanwhile, a growing body of research has explored leveraging LLMs for interpretable fake detection, aiming to explain decisions in natural language. Yet these approaches heavily depend on supervised fine-tuning, which introduces limitations such as annotation bias, hallucinated supervision, and weakened generalization. To address these challenges, we propose AvatarShield, a novel multimodal human-centric synthetic video detection framework that eliminates the need for dense textual supervision by adopting Group Relative Policy Optimization, enabling LLMs to develop reasoning capabilities from simple binary labels. Our architecture combines a discrete vision tower for high-level semantic inconsistencies and a residual extractor for fine-grained artifact analysis. We further introduce FakeHumanVid, a large-scale benchmark containing 15K real and synthetic videos across nine state-of-the-art human generation methods driven by text, pose, or audio. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AvatarShield outperforms existing methods in both in-domain and cross-domain settings.