Band-Attention Modulation Network for Robust Face Forgery Detection

Face forgery detection faces critical challenges in generalizing to unseen manipulation techniques and remaining robust under image compression, which often obscures subtle artifacts. Existing methods typically rely on fixed filters or coarse band separation, lacking the adaptability to learn task-specific spectral cues. To address this, we propose the Band-Attention Modulation Network (BAM-Net), a novel framework that pioneers learnable, fine-grained modulation of frequency components for forgery detection. At its core is the Band-Attention Modulation (BAM) mechanism, which transforms an image into its Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) spectrogram and learns to dynamically reweight frequency bands along anti-diagonals. This process effectively enhances forgery-related spectral signatures while suppressing less informative ones, simulating an adaptive "inverse compression" that counters information loss. The modulated frequency information is then fused with the spatial domain to guide a lightweight yet effective spatial backbone equipped with distance-decayed attention for comprehensive feature extraction. Extensive experiments on FaceForensics++, Celeb-DF, and DFDC datasets demonstrate that BAM-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance. More importantly, it exhibits exceptional generalization in cross-dataset, cross-compression, and cross-manipulation scenarios, underscoring the vital role of adaptive frequency band modulation in building robust forgery detectors.