# Exploiting Fine-grained Face Forgery Clues via Progressive Enhancement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.13977 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13977/

## Key facts

- Cited by 60 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [MesoNet: a Compact Facial Video Forgery Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00888/) (2018)
- [Multi-attentional Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02406/) (2021)
- [Exposing Deep Fakes Using Inconsistent Head Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00661/) (2018)
- [Generalizing Face Forgery Detection with High-frequency Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12376/) (2021)
- [On the Detection of Digital Face Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01717/) (2019)
- [FaceShifter: Towards High Fidelity And Occlusion Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13457/) (2019)
- [WildDeepfake: A Challenging Real-World Dataset for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01456/) (2021)
- [Learning in the Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12416/) (2020)
- [Two-branch Recurrent Network for Isolating Deepfakes in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03412/) (2020)
- [Frequency-aware Discriminative Feature Learning Supervised by Single-Center Loss for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09096/) (2021)
- [Multi-task Learning For Detecting and Segmenting Manipulated Facial Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06876/) (2019)
- [DSFD: Dual Shot Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10220/) (2018)
- [Local Relation Learning for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02577/) (2021)
- [Spatiotemporal Inconsistency Learning for DeepFake Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01860/) (2021)
- [Recasting Residual-based Local Descriptors as Convolutional Neural Networks: an Application to Image Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04615/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [UCF: Uncovering Common Features for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13949/) (2023)
- [Transcending Forgery Specificity with Latent Space Augmentation for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11278/) (2023)
- [TALL: Thumbnail Layout for Deepfake Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07494/) (2023)
- [Detecting and Grounding Multi-Modal Media Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02556/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Style Latent Flows for Generalizing Deepfake Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06592/) (2024)
- [Generalizing Deepfake Video Detection with Plug-and-Play: Video-Level Blending and Spatiotemporal Adapter Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17065/) (2024)
- [Deepfake Detection: A Comprehensive Survey from the Reliability Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10881/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Prior Forgery Knowledge: Mining Critical Clues for General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12489/) (2023)
- [FreqBlender: Enhancing DeepFake Detection by Blending Frequency Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13872/) (2024)
- [Exploring Frequency Adversarial Attacks for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15674/) (2022)
- [SHIELD : An Evaluation Benchmark for Face Spoofing and Forgery Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04178/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Vision-Language Model in Face Forensics: Multi-Modal Interpretable Forged Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20188/) (2025)
- [X2-DFD: A framework for eXplainable and eXtendable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06126/) (2024)
- [Explaining Deepfake Detection by Analysing Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09679/) (2022)
- [Fake It till You Make It: Curricular Dynamic Forgery Augmentations towards General Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14444/) (2024)
- [GAN-generated Faces Detection: A Survey and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07145/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Pseudo Learning for Open-World DeepFake Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11132/) (2023)
- [DeepFake-Adapter: Dual-Level Adapter for DeepFake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00863/) (2023)
- [FSFM: A Generalizable Face Security Foundation Model via Self-Supervised Facial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12032/) (2024)
- [From Specificity to Generality: Revisiting Generalizable Artifacts in Detecting Face Deepfakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04827/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Defenses Against AI-Generated Visual Media: Detection,Disruption, and Authentication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10575/) (2024)
- [Beyond Spatial Frequency: Pixel-wise Temporal Frequency-based Deepfake Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02398/) (2025)
- [Multi-spectral Class Center Network for Face Manipulation Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10794/) (2023)
- [Learning to Discover Forgery Cues for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01030/) (2024)
- [Diff-ID: An Explainable Identity Difference Quantification Framework for DeepFake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18174/) (2023)
- [Spatial-Temporal Frequency Forgery Clue for Video Forgery Detection in VIS and NIR Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01906/) (2022)
- [RetouchingFFHQ: A Large-scale Dataset for Fine-grained Face Retouching Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10642/) (2023)
- [FakeTracer: Catching Face-swap DeepFakes via Implanting Traces in Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14593/) (2023)
- [Artifact Feature Purification for Cross-domain Detection of AI-generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11172/) (2024)
- [On the Holistic Approach for Detecting Human Image Forgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04715/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid development of facial forgery techniques, forgery detection has attracted more and more attention due to security concerns. Existing approaches attempt to use frequency information to mine subtle artifacts under high-quality forged faces. However, the exploitation of frequency information is coarse-grained, and more importantly, their vanilla learning process struggles to extract fine-grained forgery traces. To address this issue, we propose a progressive enhancement learning framework to exploit both the RGB and fine-grained frequency clues. Specifically, we perform a fine-grained decomposition of RGB images to completely decouple the real and fake traces in the frequency space. Subsequently, we propose a progressive enhancement learning framework based on a two-branch network, combined with self-enhancement and mutual-enhancement modules. The self-enhancement module captures the traces in different input spaces based on spatial noise enhancement and channel attention. The Mutual-enhancement module concurrently enhances RGB and frequency features by communicating in the shared spatial dimension. The progressive enhancement process facilitates the learning of discriminative features with fine-grained face forgery clues. Extensive experiments on several datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art face forgery detection methods.