# OpenFake: An Open Dataset and Platform Toward Real-World Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09495 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09495/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors that Generalize Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10174/) (2023)
- [MesoNet: a Compact Facial Video Forgery Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00888/) (2018)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [GenImage: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08571/) (2023)
- [On the detection of synthetic images generated by diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00680/) (2022)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [Spatial-Phase Shallow Learning: Rethinking Face Forgery Detection in Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01856/) (2021)
- [DeepfakeBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01426/) (2023)
- [Raising the Bar of AI-generated Image Detection with CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00195/) (2023)
- [DOCCI: Descriptions of Connected and Contrasting Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19753/) (2024)
- [DeepFaceLab: Integrated, flexible and extensible face-swapping framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05535/) (2020)
- [ForgeryNet: A Versatile Benchmark for Comprehensive Forgery Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05630/) (2021)
- [Face Forensics in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16076/) (2021)
- [Robustness of AI-Image Detectors: Fundamental Limits and Practical Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00076/) (2023)
- [Superintelligent Agents Pose Catastrophic Risks: Can Scientist AI Offer a Safer Path?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15657/) (2025)
- [Can ChatGPT Detect DeepFakes? A Study of Using Multimodal Large Language Models for Media Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14077/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Who Made This? Fake Detection and Source Attribution with Diffusion Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27602/) (2025)
- [Origin Lens: A Privacy-First Mobile Framework for Cryptographic Image Provenance and AI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03423/) (2026)
- [SSAFE: Simple and Strong AI-Generated Image Detection via Frozen Vision Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08634/) (2026)
- [Efficient Zero-Shot AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21619/) (2026)
- [Can You Trust What You See? Human and AI Detection of Synthetic Legal Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07613/) (2026)
- [Need We Teach Foundation Models What is a Generative Image? Gradient-Free Generative Artifact Detection via Analytic Spectral Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07660/) (2026)
- [Scalable Black-Box Model Attribution for Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15652/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking Neural Defend ARCAS 1B: A Foundational Multimodal Deepfake Detection Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25154/) (2026)
- [Mandela-Bench: Multimodal Models Remember Canonical Images Instead of Seeing Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32763/) (2026)
- [Forensic Reserve: Eliciting Latent Knowledge for Image Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08639/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deepfakes, synthetic media created using advanced AI techniques, pose a growing threat to information integrity, particularly in politically sensitive contexts. This challenge is amplified by the increasing realism of modern generative models, which our human perception study confirms are often indistinguishable from real images. Yet, existing deepfake detection benchmarks rely on outdated generators or narrowly scoped datasets (e.g., single-face imagery), limiting their utility for real-world detection. To address these gaps, we present OpenFake, a large politically grounded dataset specifically crafted for benchmarking against modern generative models with high realism, and designed to remain extensible through an innovative crowdsourced adversarial platform that continually integrates new hard examples. OpenFake comprises nearly four million total images: three million real images paired with descriptive captions and almost one million synthetic counterparts from state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models. Detectors trained on OpenFake achieve near-perfect in-distribution performance, strong generalization to unseen generators, and high accuracy on a curated in-the-wild social media test set, significantly outperforming models trained on existing datasets. Overall, we demonstrate that with high-quality and continually updated benchmarks, automatic deepfake detection is both feasible and effective in real-world settings.