# CAE-Net: Generalized Deepfake Image Detection using Convolution and Attention Mechanisms with Spatial and Frequency Domain Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10682 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10682/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [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)
- [FaceShifter: Towards High Fidelity And Occlusion Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13457/) (2019)
- [DeepFakes: a New Threat to Face Recognition? Assessment and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08685/) (2018)
- [The Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) Preview Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08854/) (2019)
- [Searching for Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05941/) (2017)
- [DeepfakeBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01426/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SegWave: Wavelet-Driven Segmentation of Tampered Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30714/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The spread of deepfakes poses significant security concerns, demanding reliable detection methods. However, diverse generation techniques and class imbalance in datasets create challenges. We propose CAE-Net, a Convolution- and Attention-based weighted Ensemble network combining spatial and frequency-domain features for effective deepfake detection. The architecture integrates EfficientNet, Data-Efficient Image Transformer (DeiT), and ConvNeXt with wavelet features to learn complementary representations. We evaluated CAE-Net on the diverse IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2025 (DF-Wild Cup) dataset, which has a 5:1 fake-to-real class imbalance. To address this, we introduce a multistage disjoint-subset training strategy, sequentially training the model on non-overlapping subsets of the fake class while retaining knowledge across stages. Our approach achieved 94.46% accuracy and a 97.60% AUC, outperforming conventional class-balancing methods. Visualizations confirm the network focuses on meaningful facial regions, and our ensemble design demonstrates robustness against adversarial attacks, positioning CAE-Net as a dependable and generalized deepfake detection framework.