# Common Sense Reasoning for Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00126 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00126/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [A-OKVQA: A Benchmark for Visual Question Answering using World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01718/) (2022)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13458/) (2019)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [FakeShield: Explainable Image Forgery Detection and Localization via Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02761/) (2024)
- [SIDA: Social Media Image Deepfake Detection, Localization and Explanation with Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04292/) (2024)
- [Spot the Fake: Large Multimodal Model-Based Synthetic Image Detection with Artifact Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14905/) (2025)
- [FFAA: Multimodal Large Language Model based Explainable Open-World Face Forgery Analysis Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10072/) (2024)
- [On Learning Multi-Modal Forgery Representation for Diffusion Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23623/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Vision-Language Model in Face Forensics: Multi-Modal Interpretable Forged Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20188/) (2025)
- [FakeBench: Probing Explainable Fake Image Detection via Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13306/) (2024)
- [X2-DFD: A framework for eXplainable and eXtendable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06126/) (2024)
- [AIGI-Holmes: Towards Explainable and Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02664/) (2025)
- [SPARTUN3D: Situated Spatial Understanding of 3D World in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03878/) (2024)
- [Toward Generalizable Forgery Detection and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21210/) (2025)
- [Language-guided Hierarchical Fine-grained Image Forgery Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23556/) (2024)
- [50 Years of Automated Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24247/) (2025)
- [When and How Much to Imagine: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling with World Models for Visual Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08236/) (2026)
- [ForgeryGPT: A Multimodal LLM for Interpretable Image Forgery Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10238/) (2024)
- [Forensics-Bench: A Comprehensive Forgery Detection Benchmark Suite for Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15024/) (2025)
- [Face-Human-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Face and Human Understanding for Multi-modal Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01243/) (2025)
- [VLForgery Face Triad: Detection, Localization and Attribution via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06142/) (2025)
- [MFCLIP: Multi-modal Fine-grained CLIP for Generalizable Diffusion Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09724/) (2024)
- [FakeScope: Large Multimodal Expert Model for Transparent AI-Generated Image Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24267/) (2025)
- [A Quality-Guided Mixture of Score-Fusion Experts Framework for Human Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00053/) (2025)
- [A Review of Multimodal Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14056/) (2024)
- [Towards Explainable Fake Image Detection with Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14245/) (2025)
- [Fake-HR1: Rethinking Reasoning of Vision Language Model for Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10042/) (2026)
- [Guard Me If You Know Me: Protecting Specific Face-Identity from Deepfakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19582/) (2025)
- [Evolving from Single-modal to Multi-modal Facial Deepfake Detection: Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06965/) (2024)
- [EvoGuard: An Extensible Agentic RL-based Framework for Practical and Evolving AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17343/) (2026)
- [So-Fake: Benchmarking and Explaining Social Media Image Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18660/) (2025)
- [PRPO: Paragraph-level Policy Optimization for Vision-Language Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26272/) (2025)
- [On the Holistic Approach for Detecting Human Image Forgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04715/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art deepfake detection approaches rely on image-based features extracted via neural networks. While these approaches trained in a supervised manner extract likely fake features, they may fall short in representing unnatural `non-physical' semantic facial attributes -- blurry hairlines, double eyebrows, rigid eye pupils, or unnatural skin shading. However, such facial attributes are easily perceived by humans and used to discern the authenticity of an image based on human common sense. Furthermore, image-based feature extraction methods that provide visual explanations via saliency maps can be hard to interpret for humans. To address these challenges, we frame deepfake detection as a Deepfake Detection VQA (DD-VQA) task and model human intuition by providing textual explanations that describe common sense reasons for labeling an image as real or fake. We introduce a new annotated dataset and propose a Vision and Language Transformer-based framework for the DD-VQA task. We also incorporate text and image-aware feature alignment formulation to enhance multi-modal representation learning. As a result, we improve upon existing deepfake detection models by integrating our learned vision representations, which reason over common sense knowledge from the DD-VQA task. We provide extensive empirical results demonstrating that our method enhances detection performance, generalization ability, and language-based interpretability in the deepfake detection task.