# Fusion-SSAT: Unleashing the Potential of Self-supervised Auxiliary Task by Feature Fusion for Generalized Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00789 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00789/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [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)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [Detecting Deepfakes with Self-Blended Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08376/) (2022)
- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we attempted to unleash the potential of self-supervised learning as an auxiliary task that can optimise the primary task of generalised deepfake detection. To explore this, we examined different combinations of the training schemes for these tasks that can be most effective. Our findings reveal that fusing the feature representation from self-supervised auxiliary tasks is a powerful feature representation for the problem at hand. Such a representation can leverage the ultimate potential and bring in a unique representation of both the self-supervised and primary tasks, achieving better performance for the primary task. We experimented on a large set of datasets, which includes DF40, FaceForensics++, Celeb-DF, DFD, FaceShifter, UADFV, and our results showed better generalizability on cross-dataset evaluation when compared with current state-of-the-art detectors.