# Unleashing Vision-Language Semantics for Deepfake Video Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24454/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-jailbreaks-and-adversarial-robustness/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [StyleGAN-XL: Scaling StyleGAN to Large Diverse Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00273/) (2022)
- [Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13458/) (2019)
- [Detecting Deepfakes with Self-Blended Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08376/) (2022)
- [Exposing Deep Fakes Using Inconsistent Head Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00661/) (2018)
- [Lips Don't Lie: A Generalisable and Robust Approach to Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07657/) (2020)
- [AnomalyCLIP: Object-agnostic Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18961/) (2023)
- [Generalizing Face Forgery Detection with High-frequency Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12376/) (2021)
- [On the Detection of Digital Face Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01717/) (2019)
- [Spatial-Phase Shallow Learning: Rethinking Face Forgery Detection in Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01856/) (2021)
- [UCF: Uncovering Common Features for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13949/) (2023)
- [Exploring Temporal Coherence for More General Video Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06693/) (2021)
- [DF40: Toward Next-Generation Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13495/) (2024)
- [Transcending Forgery Specificity with Latent Space Augmentation for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11278/) (2023)
- [Implicit Identity Leakage: The Stumbling Block to Improving Deepfake Detection Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14457/) (2022)
- [Arc2Face: A Foundation Model for ID-Consistent Human Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11641/) (2024)
- [Dual Contrastive Learning for General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13522/) (2021)
- [TALL: Thumbnail Layout for Deepfake Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07494/) (2023)
- [SiT: Self-supervised vIsion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03602/) (2021)
- [Protecting Celebrities from DeepFake with Identity Consistency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01318/) (2022)
- [LAA-Net: Localized Artifact Attention Network for Quality-Agnostic and Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13856/) (2024)
- [Toward Generalist Anomaly Detection via In-context Residual Learning with Few-shot Sample Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06495/) (2024)
- [AltFreezing for More General Video Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08317/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent Deepfake Video Detection (DFD) studies have demonstrated that pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP exhibit strong generalization capabilities in detecting artifacts across different identities. However, existing approaches focus on leveraging visual features only, overlooking their most distinctive strength -- the rich vision-language semantics embedded in the latent space. We propose VLAForge, a novel DFD framework that unleashes the potential of such cross-modal semantics to enhance model's discriminability in deepfake detection. This work i) enhances the visual perception of VLM through a ForgePerceiver, which acts as an independent learner to capture diverse, subtle forgery cues both granularly and holistically, while preserving the pretrained Vision-Language Alignment (VLA) knowledge, and ii) provides a complementary discriminative cue -- Identity-Aware VLA score, derived by coupling cross-modal semantics with the forgery cues learned by ForgePerceiver. Notably, the VLA score is augmented by an identity prior-informed text prompting to capture authenticity cues tailored to each identity, thereby enabling more discriminative cross-modal semantics. Comprehensive experiments on video DFD benchmarks, including classical face-swapping forgeries and recent full-face generation forgeries, demonstrate that our VLAForge substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods at both frame and video levels. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/VLAForge.