# Towards Robust DeepFake Detection under Unstable Face Sequences: Adaptive Sparse Graph Embedding with Order-Free Representation and Explicit Laplacian Spectral Prior

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07498/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13458/) (2019)
- [Graph Signal Processing: Overview, Challenges and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00468/) (2017)
- [Exposing DeepFake Videos By Detecting Face Warping Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00656/) (2018)
- [Exposing Deep Fakes Using Inconsistent Head Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00661/) (2018)
- [Video Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00719/) (2021)
- [UCF: Uncovering Common Features for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13949/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Recurrent Convolutional Strategies for Face Manipulation Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00582/) (2019)
- [TALL: Thumbnail Layout for Deepfake Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07494/) (2023)
- [CORE: Consistent Representation Learning for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02749/) (2022)
- [Improving the Efficiency and Robustness of Deepfakes Detection through Precise Geometric Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04480/) (2021)
- [FReTAL: Generalizing Deepfake Detection using Knowledge Distillation and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13617/) (2021)
- [DFIL: Deepfake Incremental Learning by Exploiting Domain-invariant Forgery Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09526/) (2023)
- [Learning to Detect Fake Face Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08754/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Face Detectors using Neural Net based Constrained Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12302/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ensuring the authenticity of video content remains challenging as DeepFake generation becomes increasingly realistic and robust against detection. Most existing detectors implicitly assume temporally consistent and clean facial sequences, an assumption that rarely holds in real-world scenarios where compression artifacts, occlusions, and adversarial attacks destabilize face detection and often lead to invalid or misdetected faces. To address these challenges, we propose a Laplacian-Regularized Graph Convolutional Network (LR-GCN) that robustly detects DeepFakes from noisy or unordered face sequences, while being trained only on clean facial data. Our method constructs an Order-Free Temporal Graph Embedding (OF-TGE) that organizes frame-wise CNN features into an adaptive sparse graph based on semantic affinities. Unlike traditional methods constrained by strict temporal continuity, OF-TGE captures intrinsic feature consistency across frames, making it resilient to shuffled, missing, or heavily corrupted inputs. We further impose a dual-level sparsity mechanism on both graph structure and node features to suppress the influence of invalid faces. Crucially, we introduce an explicit Graph Laplacian Spectral Prior that acts as a high-pass operator in the graph spectral domain, highlighting structural anomalies and forgery artifacts, which are then consolidated by a low-pass GCN aggregation. This sequential design effectively realizes a task-driven spectral band-pass mechanism that suppresses background information and random noise while preserving manipulation cues. Extensive experiments on FF++, Celeb-DFv2, and DFDC demonstrate that LR-GCN achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly improved robustness under severe global and local disruptions, including missing faces, occlusions, and adversarially perturbed face detections.