# Towards Generalizable Deepfake Detection with Spatial-Frequency Collaborative Learning and Hierarchical Cross-Modal Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17223 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17223/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [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)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Generalizing Face Forgery Detection with High-frequency Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12376/) (2021)
- [AttGAN: Facial Attribute Editing by Only Changing What You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10678/) (2017)
- [FaceShifter: Towards High Fidelity And Occlusion Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13457/) (2019)
- [Two-branch Recurrent Network for Isolating Deepfakes in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03412/) (2020)
- [FakeCatcher: Detection of Synthetic Portrait Videos using Biological Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02212/) (2019)
- [Frequency-aware Discriminative Feature Learning Supervised by Single-Center Loss for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09096/) (2021)
- [Two-Stream Neural Networks for Tampered Face Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11276/) (2018)
- [M2TR: Multi-modal Multi-scale Transformers for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09770/) (2021)
- [LAA-Net: Localized Artifact Attention Network for Quality-Agnostic and Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13856/) (2024)
- [Unmasking DeepFakes with simple Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00686/) (2019)
- [Preserving Fairness Generalization in Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17229/) (2024)
- [DeepRhythm: Exposing DeepFakes with Attentional Visual Heartbeat Rhythms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07634/) (2020)
- [DeepFake Detection Based on the Discrepancy Between the Face and its Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12262/) (2020)
- [Exposing the Deception: Uncovering More Forgery Clues for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01786/) (2024)
- [Explaining Deepfake Detection by Analysing Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09679/) (2022)
- [DeepFakesON-Phys: DeepFakes Detection based on Heart Rate Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00400/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid evolution of deep generative models poses a critical challenge to deepfake detection, as detectors trained on forgery-specific artifacts often suffer significant performance degradation when encountering unseen forgeries. While existing methods predominantly rely on spatial domain analysis, frequency domain operations are primarily limited to feature-level augmentation, leaving frequency-native artifacts and spatial-frequency interactions insufficiently exploited. To address this limitation, we propose a novel detection framework that integrates multi-scale spatial-frequency analysis for universal deepfake detection. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) a local spectral feature extraction pipeline that combines block-wise discrete cosine transform with cascaded multi-scale convolutions to capture subtle spectral artifacts; (2) a global spectral feature extraction pipeline utilizing scale-invariant differential accumulation to identify holistic forgery distribution patterns; and (3) a multi-stage cross-modal fusion mechanism that incorporates shallow-layer attention enhancement and deep-layer dynamic modulation to model spatial-frequency interactions. Extensive evaluations on widely adopted benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art deepfake detection methods in both accuracy and generalizability.