# Evidence-based Decision Modeling for Synthetic Face Detection with Uncertainty-driven Active Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09935 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09935/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01768/) (2018)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [Deep Evidential Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02600/) (2019)
- [Learning Loss for Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03677/) (2019)
- [Any-Resolution AI-Generated Image Detection by Spectral Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19417/) (2024)
- [CNN Detection of GAN-Generated Face Images based on Cross-Band Co-occurrences Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12909/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Data for Face Recognition: Current State and Future Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01021/) (2023)
- [DeepFeatureX Net: Deep Features eXtractors based Network for discriminating synthetic from real images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15697/) (2024)
- [Model Discrepancy Learning: Synthetic Faces Detection Based on Multi-Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07382/) (2025)
- [FADEL: Uncertainty-aware Fake Audio Detection with Evidential Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15663/) (2025)
- [Mirage: Unveiling Hidden Artifacts in Synthetic Images with Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03840/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid development of deep generative models, forged facial images are massively exploited for illegal activities. Although existing synthetic face detection methods have achieved significant progress, they suffer from the inherent limitation of overconfidence due to their reliance on the Softmax activation function. Thus, these methods often lead to unreliable predictions when encountering unknown Out-of-Distribution (OOD) images, and cannot ascertain the model's uncertainty in its prediction. Meanwhile, most existing methods require massive high-quality annotated data, which greatly limits their practicability across diverse scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose EMSFD (Evidence-based decision Modeling for Synthetic Face Detection with uncertainty-driven active learning), an approach designed to enhance detection reliability and generalizability. Specifically, EMSFD models class evidence using the Dirichlet distribution and explicitly incorporates model uncertainty into the prediction process. Furthermore, during training, the estimated uncertainty is exploited to prioritize more informative samples from the unlabeled pool for annotation, thereby reducing labeling cost and improving model generalization. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method enhances the interpretability of synthetic face detection. Meanwhile, our method yields a 15% increase in accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, which demonstrates the superior detection performance and generalizability of our approach. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hzx111621/EMSFD.