Customized Transformer Adapter With Frequency Masking for Deepfake Detection

The evolution of advanced artificial intelligence generated content approaches has heightened concerns about deepfake, due to the sophisticated forgeries and concealed appearances they produce. To this end, the pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) model has become a de facto choice for deepfake detection, thanks to its powerful learning capability. Despite favorable results achieved by existing ViT-based methods, they have inherent limitations that could result in suboptimal performance in scenarios with continuously evolving forgery techniques, such as overfitting to single forgery patterns or placing excessive emphasis on dominant forgery regions. In this paper, we propose CUTA, a simple yet effective deepfake detection paradigm that utilizes ViT adapters as the medium and fully exploits the spatial- and frequency-domain features of given images to overcome the limitations of existing methods. Specifically, CUTA focuses on <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">frequency domain masking</i> within the input space, which obscures parts of the high-frequency image to intensify the training challenge while preserving subtle forgery cues in the frequency domain to facilitate comprehensive forgery representations. Furthermore, we propose two task-customized modules within the ViT model, i.e., the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">texture enhancement module</i> and the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">multi-scale perceptron module</i>, to seamlessly integrate local texture and rich contextual features. These two modules ensure an organic interaction between the task-specific forgery patterns and general semantic features within the pre-trained ViT framework. The experimental results on several publicly available benchmark datasets demonstrate CUTA’s superiority in performance, particularly showcasing its significant advantages in both cross-dataset and cross-manipulation scenarios.