# DFCon: Attention-Driven Supervised Contrastive Learning for Robust Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16704 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16704/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [CoAtNet: Marrying Convolution and Attention for All Data Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04803/) (2021)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11331/) (2023)
- [FaceShifter: Towards High Fidelity And Occlusion Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13457/) (2019)
- [The Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) Preview Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08854/) (2019)
- [DeepfakeBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01426/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Face Swapping via Regional GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14068/) (2022)
- [BlendFace: Re-designing Identity Encoders for Face-Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10854/) (2023)
- [HyperReenact: One-Shot Reenactment via Jointly Learning to Refine and Retarget Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10797/) (2023)
- [FaceDancer: Pose- and Occlusion-Aware High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10473/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This report presents our approach for the IEEE SP Cup 2025: Deepfake Face Detection in the Wild (DFWild-Cup), focusing on detecting deepfakes across diverse datasets. Our methodology employs advanced backbone models, including MaxViT, CoAtNet, and EVA-02, fine-tuned using supervised contrastive loss to enhance feature separation. These models were specifically chosen for their complementary strengths. Integration of convolution layers and strided attention in MaxViT is well-suited for detecting local features. In contrast, hybrid use of convolution and attention mechanisms in CoAtNet effectively captures multi-scale features. Robust pretraining with masked image modeling of EVA-02 excels at capturing global features. After training, we freeze the parameters of these models and train the classification heads. Finally, a majority voting ensemble is employed to combine the predictions from these models, improving robustness and generalization to unseen scenarios. The proposed system addresses the challenges of detecting deepfakes in real-world conditions and achieves a commendable accuracy of 95.83% on the validation dataset.