# Beyond Surface Artifacts: Capturing Shared Latent Forgery Knowledge Across Modalities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07763 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07763/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [LanguageBind: Extending Video-Language Pretraining to N-modality by Language-based Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01852/) (2023)
- [Balanced Multimodal Learning via On-the-fly Gradient Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15332/) (2022)
- [Deep Domain-Adversarial Image Generation for Domain Generalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06054/) (2020)
- [Invariance Principle Meets Information Bottleneck for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06607/) (2021)
- [Point-Bind & Point-LLM: Aligning Point Cloud with Multi-modality for 3D Understanding, Generation, and Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00615/) (2023)
- [Improve Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Mixup Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00677/) (2020)
- [FakeAVCeleb: A Novel Audio-Video Multimodal Deepfake Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05080/) (2021)
- [ONE-PEACE: Exploring One General Representation Model Toward Unlimited Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11172/) (2023)
- [DeMamba: AI-Generated Video Detection on Million-Scale GenVideo Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19707/) (2024)
- [Spot the Fake: Large Multimodal Model-Based Synthetic Image Detection with Artifact Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14905/) (2025)
- [Probable Domain Generalization via Quantile Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09944/) (2022)
- [UniBind: LLM-Augmented Unified and Balanced Representation Space to Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12532/) (2024)
- [SimMMDG: A Simple and Effective Framework for Multi-modal Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19795/) (2023)
- [On Learning Multi-Modal Forgery Representation for Diffusion Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23623/) (2024)
- [DecAlign: Hierarchical Cross-Modal Alignment for Decoupled Multimodal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11892/) (2025)
- [Towards a Universal Synthetic Video Detector: From Face or Background Manipulations to Fully AI-Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12278/) (2024)
- [Unlocking the Capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models for Generalizable and Explainable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14853/) (2025)
- [Celeb-DF++: A Large-scale Challenging Video DeepFake Benchmark for Generalizable Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18015/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [SRENet: Spectral Re-Entry Network for Point Cloud Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03160/) (2026)
- [LaP-Forensics: Latent-Pixel Consistency Guided Multimodal Reasoning for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25962/) (2026)
- [A Heuristic Perspective on Debiasing Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00622/) (2026)
- [PhenoYieldNet: Learning Crop-Aware Phenological Responses for Multi-Crop Yield Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23478/) (2026)
- [Do correct answers have stable latent knowledge support?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15277/) (2026)
- [SuperAI: Merging Capabilities Across Heterogeneous Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15322/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As generative artificial intelligence evolves, deepfake attacks have escalated from single-modality manipulations to complex, multimodal threats. Existing forensic techniques face a severe generalization bottleneck: by relying excessively on superficial, modality-specific artifacts, they neglect the shared latent forgery knowledge hidden beneath variable physical appearances. Consequently, these models suffer catastrophic performance degradation when confronted with unseen "dark modalities." To break this limitation, this paper introduces a paradigm shift that redefines multimodal forensics from conventional "feature fusion" to "modality generalization." We propose the first modality-agnostic forgery (MAF) detection framework. By explicitly decoupling modality-specific styles, MAF precisely extracts the essential, cross-modal latent forgery knowledge. Furthermore, we define two progressive dimensions to quantify model generalization: transferability toward semantically correlated modalities (Weak MAF), and robustness against completely isolated signals of "dark modality" (Strong MAF). To rigorously assess these generalization limits, we introduce the DeepModal-Bench benchmark, which integrates diverse multimodal forgery detection algorithms and adapts state-of-the-art generalized learning methods. This study not only empirically proves the existence of universal forgery traces but also achieves significant performance breakthroughs on unknown modalities via the MAF framework, offering a pioneering technical pathway for universal multimodal defense.