# CUPID: Reconstructing UV Texture Maps for Interpretable Person-of-Interest Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20302 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20302/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Albumentations: fast and flexible image augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06839/) (2018)
- [Multi-Similarity Loss with General Pair Weighting for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06627/) (2019)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [Lips Don't Lie: A Generalisable and Robust Approach to Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07657/) (2020)
- [Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04558/) (2018)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [DeepFakes: a New Threat to Face Recognition? Assessment and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08685/) (2018)
- [Media Forensics and DeepFakes: an overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06564/) (2020)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [FakeAVCeleb: A Novel Audio-Video Multimodal Deepfake Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05080/) (2021)
- [Exploring Temporal Coherence for More General Video Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06693/) (2021)
- [DeepFaceLab: Integrated, flexible and extensible face-swapping framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05535/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Real Talking Faces via Self-Supervision for Robust Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07131/) (2022)
- [Fast Face-swap Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09577/) (2016)
- [VideoReTalking: Audio-based Lip Synchronization for Talking Head Video Editing In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14758/) (2022)
- [ID-Reveal: Identity-aware DeepFake Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02512/) (2020)
- [Protecting Celebrities from DeepFake with Identity Consistency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01318/) (2022)
- [Audio-driven Talking Face Video Generation with Learning-based Personalized Head Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10137/) (2020)
- [KoDF: A Large-scale Korean DeepFake Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10094/) (2021)
- [Detecting Deep-Fake Videos from Appearance and Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14491/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deepfakes targeting a high-profile individual, known as Person-of-Interest (POI), are a threat to modern democracies and societies. Current POI deepfake detection methods still struggle to combine robustness to post-processing, efficiency and interpretability, key aspects of modern deepfake detectors. In this paper we propose CUPID, a POI video deepfake detector that combines UV texture maps, a facial appearance representation derived from 3D face reconstructions, with the representation learning capabilities of the Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Our method does not require any deepfake videos in its training phase. Moreover, it does not even require including a specific POI in the training set: the combination of UV texture maps extracted from real video frames and the MAE context-guided reconstruction yields a latent space that captures rich and discriminative facial features even for identities unseen during training. In the testing phase, the embeddings extracted from a query video depicting the POI can be matched against pristine reference videos to assess the video authenticity. Furthermore, operating in the UV space naturally provides an additional layer of interpretability. Specifically, we can extract decoded residual maps that highlight which facial regions of a test video deviate most from the identity representation of the corresponding POI. Experiments on four deepfake datasets show that CUPID outperforms the current state of the art on most datasets and achieves the best overall robustness against strong downscaling and compression, while also providing substantially faster inference. Our experimental code will be released at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/CUPID.