# Unveiling Deepfakes: A Frequency-Aware Triple Branch Network for Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17477 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17477/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2026.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (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)
- [Detecting Deepfakes with Self-Blended Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08376/) (2022)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [Exposing DeepFake Videos By Detecting Face Warping Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00656/) (2018)
- [Lips Don't Lie: A Generalisable and Robust Approach to Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07657/) (2020)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [Spatial-Phase Shallow Learning: Rethinking Face Forgery Detection in Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01856/) (2021)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [DeepFakes and Beyond: A Survey of Face Manipulation and Fake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00179/) (2020)
- [Learning in the Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12416/) (2020)
- [UCF: Uncovering Common Features for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13949/) (2023)
- [FcaNet: Frequency Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11879/) (2020)
- [Two-branch Recurrent Network for Isolating Deepfakes in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03412/) (2020)
- [Frequency-aware Discriminative Feature Learning Supervised by Single-Center Loss for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09096/) (2021)
- [DF40: Toward Next-Generation Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13495/) (2024)
- [Auxiliary Tasks in Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06334/) (2018)
- [Representative Forgery Mining for Fake Face Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06609/) (2021)
- [Dual Contrastive Learning for General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13522/) (2021)
- [Protecting Celebrities from DeepFake with Identity Consistency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01318/) (2022)
- [CORE: Consistent Representation Learning for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02749/) (2022)
- [Preserving Fairness Generalization in Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17229/) (2024)
- [UIA-ViT: Unsupervised Inconsistency-Aware Method based on Vision Transformer for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12752/) (2022)
- [Detecting Deep-Fake Videos from Appearance and Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14491/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Advanced deepfake technologies are blurring the lines between real and fake, presenting both revolutionary opportunities and alarming threats. While it unlocks novel applications in fields like entertainment and education, its malicious use has sparked urgent ethical and societal concerns ranging from identity theft to the dissemination of misinformation. To tackle these challenges, feature analysis using frequency features has emergedas a promising direction for deepfake detection. However, oneaspect that has been overlooked so far is that existing methodstend to concentrate on one or a few specific frequency domains,which risks overfitting to particular artifacts and significantlyundermines their robustness when facing diverse forgery patterns. Another underexplored aspect we observe is that different features often attend to the same forged region, resulting in redundant feature representations and limiting the diversity of the extracted clues. This may undermine the ability of a model to capture complementary information across different facets, thereby compromising its generalization capability to diverse manipulations. In this paper, we seek to tackle these challenges from two aspects: (1) we propose a triple-branch network that jointly captures spatial and frequency features by learning from both original image and image reconstructed by different frequency channels, and (2) we mathematically derive feature decoupling and fusion losses grounded in the mutual information theory, which enhances the model to focus on task-relevant features across the original image and the image reconstructed by different frequency channels. Extensive experiments on six large-scale benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is released at https://github.com/injooker/Unveiling Deepfake.