# EMO-BOOST: Emotion-Augmented Audio-Visual Features for Improved Generalization in Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19630 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19630/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors that Generalize Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10174/) (2023)
- [Challenges in Representation Learning: A report on three machine learning contests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1307.0414/) (2013)
- [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)
- [emotion2vec: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Speech Emotion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15185/) (2023)
- [Ternary Weight Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04711/) (2016)
- [FakeAVCeleb: A Novel Audio-Video Multimodal Deepfake Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05080/) (2021)
- [Memory Fusion Network for Multi-view Sequential Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00927/) (2018)
- [Emotion Recognition from Speech Using Wav2vec 2.0 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03502/) (2021)
- [Exploring Temporal Coherence for More General Video Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06693/) (2021)
- [DFEW: A Large-Scale Database for Recognizing Dynamic Facial Expressions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05924/) (2020)
- [Implicit Identity Leakage: The Stumbling Block to Improving Deepfake Detection Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14457/) (2022)
- [Emotions Don't Lie: An Audio-Visual Deepfake Detection Method Using Affective Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06711/) (2020)
- [TransFER: Learning Relation-aware Facial Expression Representations with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11116/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Video Forensics by Audio-Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01767/) (2023)
- [A Fine-tuned Wav2vec 2.0/HuBERT Benchmark For Speech Emotion Recognition, Speaker Verification and Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02735/) (2021)
- [Deepfake Video Detection Using Convolutional Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11126/) (2021)
- [FERV39k: A Large-Scale Multi-Scene Dataset for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09463/) (2022)
- [MAFW: A Large-scale, Multi-modal, Compound Affective Database for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00847/) (2022)
- [AVFF: Audio-Visual Feature Fusion for Video Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02951/) (2024)
- [Speech Emotion Recognition using Self-Supervised Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03896/) (2022)
- [POSTER: A Pyramid Cross-Fusion Transformer Network for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04083/) (2022)
- [Voice-Face Homogeneity Tells Deepfake](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02195/) (2022)
- [MAE-DFER: Efficient Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02227/) (2023)
- [Intensity-Aware Loss for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10335/) (2022)
- [From Static to Dynamic: Adapting Landmark-Aware Image Models for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05447/) (2023)
- [Island Loss for Learning Discriminative Features in Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03144/) (2017)
- [Expression Snippet Transformer for Robust Video-based Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08409/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With every advancement in generative AI models, forensics is under increasing pressure. The constant emergence of new generation techniques makes it impossible to collect data for each manipulation to train a deepfake detection model. Thus, generalizing to deepfakes unseen during training is one of the major challenges in current deepfake detection research. To tackle this challenge, we employ high-level semantic cues and argue that these cues can support low-level focused approaches in generalizing to unseen types of manipulations. In this work, we study emotions as a high-level semantic cue. We propose Emo-Boost, a multimodal deepfake detection framework that fuses an off-the-shelf RGB- and acoustic-focused deepfake detector with our emotion-based deepfake detector EmoForensics. EmoForensics utilises vision and audio emotion recognition modules and models intra- and inter-modal temporal consistency in emotion representations from an audio-visual stream. We found that EmoForensics and the low-level focused method capture complementary signals. Consequently, combining both signals in EmoBoost enhances the average cross-manipulation generalization AUC by 2.1% on FakeAVCeleb.