# Revealing the Truth with ConLLM for Detecting Multi-Modal Deepfakes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17530 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17530/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2026.

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

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Multi-attentional Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02406/) (2021)
- [WildDeepfake: A Challenging Real-World Dataset for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01456/) (2021)
- [Audio Flamingo: A Novel Audio Language Model with Few-Shot Learning and Dialogue Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01831/) (2024)
- [FakeAVCeleb: A Novel Audio-Video Multimodal Deepfake Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05080/) (2021)
- [DeepfakeBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01426/) (2023)
- [Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03983/) (2025)
- [MiniGPT4-Video: Advancing Multimodal LLMs for Video Understanding with Interleaved Visual-Textual Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03413/) (2024)
- [Emotions Don't Lie: An Audio-Visual Deepfake Detection Method Using Affective Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06711/) (2020)
- [Representative Forgery Mining for Fake Face Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06609/) (2021)
- [Not made for each other- Audio-Visual Dissonance-based Deepfake Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14405/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Video Forensics by Audio-Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01767/) (2023)
- [STC Antispoofing Systems for the ASVspoof2019 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05576/) (2019)
- [Goldfish: Vision-Language Understanding of Arbitrarily Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12679/) (2024)
- [VATLM: Visual-Audio-Text Pre-Training with Unified Masked Prediction for Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11275/) (2022)
- [Heterogeneity over Homogeneity: Investigating Multilingual Speech Pre-Trained Models for Detecting Audio Deepfake](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00809/) (2024)
- [ChildGuard: A Specialized Dataset for Combatting Child-Targeted Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21613/) (2025)
- [MAGIC-Enhanced Keyword Prompting for Zero-Shot Audio Captioning with CLIP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12591/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid rise of deepfake technology poses a severe threat to social and political stability by enabling hyper-realistic synthetic media capable of manipulating public perception. However, existing detection methods struggle with two core limitations: (1) modality fragmentation, which leads to poor generalization across diverse and adversarial deepfake modalities; and (2) shallow inter-modal reasoning, resulting in limited detection of fine-grained semantic inconsistencies. To address these, we propose ConLLM (Contrastive Learning with Large Language Models), a hybrid framework for robust multimodal deepfake detection. ConLLM employs a two-stage architecture: stage 1 uses Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) to extract modality-specific embeddings; stage 2 aligns these embeddings via contrastive learning to mitigate modality fragmentation, and refines them using LLM-based reasoning to address shallow inter-modal reasoning by capturing semantic inconsistencies. ConLLM demonstrates strong performance across audio, video, and audio-visual modalities. It reduces audio deepfake EER by up to 50%, improves video accuracy by up to 8%, and achieves approximately 9% accuracy gains in audio-visual tasks. Ablation studies confirm that PTM-based embeddings contribute 9%-10% consistent improvements across modalities.