SELFI: Selective Fusion of Identity for Generalizable Deepfake Detection

Face identity provides a powerful signal for deepfake detection. Prior studies show that even when not explicitly modeled, classifiers often learn identity features implicitly. This has led to conflicting views: some suppress identity cues to reduce bias, while others rely on them as forensic evidence. To reconcile these views, we analyze two hypotheses: (1) whether face identity alone is discriminative for detecting deepfakes, and (2) whether such identity features generalize poorly across manipulation methods. Our experiments confirm that identity is informative but context-dependent. While some manipulations preserve identity-consistent artifacts, others distort identity cues and harm generalization. We argue that identity features should neither be blindly suppressed nor relied upon, but instead be explicitly modeled and adaptively controlled based on per-sample relevance. We propose SELFI (SELective Fusion of Identity), a generalizable detection framework that dynamically modulates identity usage. SELFI consists of: (1) a Forgery-Aware Identity Adapter (FAIA) that extracts identity embeddings from a frozen face recognition model and projects them into a forgery-relevant space via auxiliary supervision; and (2) an Identity-Aware Fusion Module (IAFM) that selectively integrates identity and visual features using a relevance-guided fusion mechanism. Experiments on four benchmarks show that SELFI improves cross-manipulation generalization, outperforming prior methods by an average of 3.1% AUC. On the challenging DFDC dataset, SELFI exceeds the previous best by 6%. Code will be released upon paper acceptance.