# MD-CSDNetwork: Multi-Domain Cross Stitched Network for Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07311/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13458/) (2019)
- [Cross-stitch Networks for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03539/) (2016)
- [MesoNet: a Compact Facial Video Forgery Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00888/) (2018)
- [Exposing DeepFake Videos By Detecting Face Warping Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00656/) (2018)
- [Exposing Deep Fakes Using Inconsistent Head Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00661/) (2018)
- [Detecting and Simulating Artifacts in GAN Fake Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06515/) (2019)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [Generalizing Face Forgery Detection with High-frequency Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12376/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Phase Shallow Learning: Rethinking Face Forgery Detection in Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01856/) (2021)
- [DeepFakes and Beyond: A Survey of Face Manipulation and Fake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00179/) (2020)
- [Do GANs leave artificial fingerprints?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11842/) (2018)
- [Capsule-Forensics: Using Capsule Networks to Detect Forged Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11215/) (2018)
- [Two-branch Recurrent Network for Isolating Deepfakes in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03412/) (2020)
- [Learning Rich Features for Image Manipulation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04953/) (2018)
- [FakeCatcher: Detection of Synthetic Portrait Videos using Biological Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02212/) (2019)
- [Multi-task Learning For Detecting and Segmenting Manipulated Facial Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06876/) (2019)
- [Two-Stream Neural Networks for Tampered Face Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11276/) (2018)
- [Recurrent Convolutional Strategies for Face Manipulation Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00582/) (2019)
- [ForensicTransfer: Weakly-supervised Domain Adaptation for Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02510/) (2018)
- [DeepFake Detection by Analyzing Convolutional Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10448/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Multimodal Graph Learning for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05419/) (2022)
- [D2Fusion: Dual-domain Fusion with Feature Superposition for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17184/) (2025)
- [A Novel Unified Approach to Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03382/) (2026)
- [SegWave: Wavelet-Driven Segmentation of Tampered Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30714/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid progress in the ease of creating and spreading ultra-realistic media over social platforms calls for an urgent need to develop a generalizable deepfake detection technique. It has been observed that current deepfake generation methods leave discriminative artifacts in the frequency spectrum of fake images and videos. Inspired by this observation, in this paper, we present a novel approach, termed as MD-CSDNetwork, for combining the features in the spatial and frequency domains to mine a shared discriminative representation for classifying textitdeepfakes. MD-CSDNetwork is a novel cross-stitched network with two parallel branches carrying the spatial and frequency information, respectively. We hypothesize that these multi-domain input data streams can be considered as related supervisory signals. The supervision from both branches ensures better performance and generalization. Further, the concept of cross-stitch connections is utilized where they are inserted between the two branches to learn an optimal combination of domain-specific and shared representations from other domains automatically. Extensive experiments are conducted on the popular benchmark dataset namely FaceForeniscs++ for forgery classification. We report improvements over all the manipulation types in FaceForensics++ dataset and comparable results with state-of-the-art methods for cross-database evaluation on the Celeb-DF dataset and the Deepfake Detection Dataset.