# Why Fake ? Unveiling the Semantic Vocabulary of Deepfake Detectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07216 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07216/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2026.

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

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Mechanistic Interpretability for AI Safety -- A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14082/) (2024)
- [MesoNet: a Compact Facial Video Forgery Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00888/) (2018)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [Exposing Deep Fakes Using Inconsistent Head Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00661/) (2018)
- [DeeperForensics-1.0: A Large-Scale Dataset for Real-World Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03024/) (2020)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Learning of Adversarial Example: Towards Good Generalizations for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12208/) (2022)
- [DeepFaceLab: Integrated, flexible and extensible face-swapping framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05535/) (2020)
- [DF40: Toward Next-Generation Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13495/) (2024)
- [ForgeryNet: A Versatile Benchmark for Comprehensive Forgery Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05630/) (2021)
- [Fast Face-swap Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09577/) (2016)
- [DiffFace: Diffusion-based Face Swapping with Facial Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13344/) (2022)
- [HyperReenact: One-Shot Reenactment via Jointly Learning to Refine and Retarget Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10797/) (2023)
- [SkyReels-A1: Expressive Portrait Animation in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10841/) (2025)
- [Smooth-Swap: A Simple Enhancement for Face-Swapping with Smoothness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05907/) (2021)
- [Robust Semantic Interpretability: Revisiting Concept Activation Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02768/) (2021)
- [CanonSwap: High-Fidelity and Consistent Video Face Swapping via Canonical Space Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02691/) (2025)
- [FSRT: Facial Scene Representation Transformer for Face Reenactment from Factorized Appearance, Head-pose, and Facial Expression Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09736/) (2024)
- [Beyond Spatial Frequency: Pixel-wise Temporal Frequency-based Deepfake Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02398/) (2025)
- [Delocate: Detection and Localization for Deepfake Videos with Randomly-Located Tampered Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13516/) (2024)
- [Face Transformer: Towards High Fidelity and Accurate Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02530/) (2023)
- [Multi-spectral Class Center Network for Face Manipulation Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10794/) (2023)
- [DynamicFace: High-Quality and Consistent Face Swapping for Image and Video using Composable 3D Facial Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08553/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DF-CBM: Region-Aware Concept Bottleneck Models for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35096/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deepfake (DF) technology poses a significant threat to information integrity, driving the need for robust detection methods. Most DF detectors only consider predicting a binary label for whether the input is real or fake, lacking the justification required for real-world applications like legal proceedings. Explainable DF Detection has emerged to address this limitation, but existing techniques frequently fall short by either relying on human annotations for precise artifact localization or generating superficially plausible textual explanations without grounding. This work investigates the use of post-hoc explainable AI (XAI) to analyze the decision-making process of state-of-the-art black-box DF detectors. Specifically, we employ Encoding-Decoding Direction Pairs (EDDP), a technique suitable for uncovering the concept space of DF detectors (their semantic vocabulary) as well as the mechanism for writing and reading concept information to and from internal representations. Our analysis reveals previously hidden real and fake features learned implicitly during detector training, offering nuanced explanations unattainable through conventional methods. This enables global model understanding, spatially aware concept localization, and counterfactual what-if analysis, all contributing to a deeper comprehension of DF detection strategies.