Revisiting Simple Baselines for In-The-Wild Deepfake Detection

The widespread adoption of synthetic media demands accessible deepfake detectors and realistic benchmarks. While most existing research evaluates deepfake detectors on highly controlled datasets, we focus on the recently released "in-the-wild" benchmark, Deepfake-Eval-2024. Initial reporting on Deepfake-Eval-2024 showed that three finetuned open-source models achieve accuracies between 61% and 69%, significantly lagging behind the leading commercial deepfake detector with 82% accuracy. Our work revisits one of these baseline approaches, originally introduced by Ojha et al., which adapts standard pretrained vision backbones to produce generalizable deepfake detectors. We demonstrate that with better-tuned hyperparameters, this simple approach actually yields much higher performance -- 81% accuracy on Deepfake-Eval-2024 -- surpassing the previously reported accuracy of this baseline approach by 18% and competing with commercial deepfake detectors. We discuss tradeoffs in accuracy, computational costs, and interpretability, focusing on how practical these deepfake detectors might be when deployed in real-world settings. Our code can be found at https://github.com/Deepfake-Detection-KKO/deepfake-detection.