# GLID: Gated Local Intrinsic Dimension Repairs the Blind Spots of Face-Forgery Detectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18770 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18770/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors that Generalize Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10174/) (2023)
- [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)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12194/) (2022)
- [EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11331/) (2023)
- [Detecting Deepfakes with Self-Blended Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08376/) (2022)
- [The Intrinsic Dimension of Images and Its Impact on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08894/) (2021)
- [Lips Don't Lie: A Generalisable and Robust Approach to Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07657/) (2020)
- [Characterizing Adversarial Subspaces Using Local Intrinsic Dimensionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02613/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fine-tuned foundation-model detectors dominate face-forgery benchmarks, yet they stay blind to generator families absent from training. We present GLID, a detector that repairs this blind spot with geometry instead of data. GLID treats the patch tokens of a single image as a sample from a manifold and estimates their local intrinsic dimension (LID) at several depths of a frozen vision transformer. This 12-dimensional, training-free signal enters a fine-tuned detector through a confidence gate whose strength is calibrated purely in-distribution. On a 16-axis cross-generator benchmark, GLID reaches 0.805 mean AUC, first among retrained state-of-the-art baselines and never significantly behind the strongest of them on any axis. It lifts the generation axes by +0.084 AUC while moving reenactment by only -0.005. Two empirical laws explain the design. First, forged faces bend the token manifold at family-specific depths: GAN artifacts peak at the last layer, diffusion artifacts peak mid-network, and the pattern survives four backbones, three dimension estimators, and non-face imagery. Second, fine-tuning absorbs auxiliary gains exactly where training data covers: injecting 1% target-family images erases a +0.100 gain, so geometric signals matter precisely where data is unavailable. The deterministic signal also cuts the cross-seed spread of accuracy 5.5x. Code, preregistered analysis gates, and per-image scores accompany the paper.