# Word-Anchored Temporal Forgery Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06220 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06220/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09702/) (2019)
- [ActionFormer: Localizing Moments of Actions with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07925/) (2022)
- [Orthogonal Subspace Decomposition for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15633/) (2024)
- [AV-Deepfake1M: A Large-Scale LLM-Driven Audio-Visual Deepfake Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15308/) (2023)
- [Deepfake Detection: A Comprehensive Survey from the Reliability Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10881/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Prior Forgery Knowledge: Mining Critical Clues for General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12489/) (2023)
- [Glitch in the Matrix: A Large Scale Benchmark for Content Driven Audio-Visual Forgery Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01979/) (2023)
- [UMMAFormer: A Universal Multimodal-adaptive Transformer Framework for Temporal Forgery Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14395/) (2023)
- [Circumventing shortcuts in audio-visual deepfake detection datasets with unsupervised learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00175/) (2024)
- [Robust Identity Perceptual Watermark Against Deepfake Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01357/) (2023)
- [DiMoDif: Discourse Modality-information Differentiation for Audio-visual Deepfake Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10193/) (2024)
- [A Multimodal Deviation Perceiving Framework for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Forgery Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16596/) (2025)
- [FractalForensics: Proactive Deepfake Detection and Localization via Fractal Watermarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09451/) (2025)
- [AuViRe: Audio-visual Speech Representation Reconstruction for Deepfake Temporal Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18993/) (2025)
- [Pindrop it! Audio and Visual Deepfake Countermeasures for Robust Detection and Fine Grained-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08141/) (2025)
- [Context-aware TFL: A Universal Context-aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Temporal Forgery Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08493/) (2025)
- [Localizing Audio-Visual Deepfakes via Hierarchical Boundary Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02000/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current temporal forgery localization (TFL) approaches typically rely on temporal boundary regression or continuous frame-level anomaly detection paradigms to derive candidate forgery proposals. However, they suffer not only from feature granularity misalignment but also from costly computation. To address these issues, we propose word-anchored temporal forgery localization (WAFL), a novel paradigm that shifts the TFL task from temporal regression and continuous localization to discrete word-level binary classification. Specifically, we first analyze the essence of temporal forgeries and identify the minimum meaningful forgery units, word tokens, and then align data preprocessing with the natural linguistic boundaries of speech. To adapt powerful pre-trained foundation backbones for feature extraction, we introduce the forensic feature realignment (FFR) module, mapping representations from the pre-trained semantic space to a discriminative forensic manifold. This allows subsequent lightweight linear classifiers to efficiently perform binary classification and accomplish the TFL task. Furthermore, to overcome the extreme class imbalance inherent to forgery detection, we design the artifact-centric asymmetric (ACA) loss, which breaks the standard precision-recall trade-off by dynamically suppressing overwhelming authentic gradients while asymmetrically prioritizing subtle forensic artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WAFL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in localization performance under both in- and cross-dataset settings, while requiring substantially fewer learnable parameters and operating at high computational efficiency.