# V-FIND: Revealing the Intrinsic Forgery Knowledge Encoded in Video Forgery Detectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03008 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03008/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution: Quantitative Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11279/) (2017)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Network Dissection: Quantifying Interpretability of Deep Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05796/) (2017)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02816/) (2022)
- [Understanding the Role of Individual Units in a Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05041/) (2020)
- [Forgery-aware Adaptive Transformer for Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16649/) (2023)
- [DeepfakeBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01426/) (2023)
- [DeMamba: AI-Generated Video Detection on Million-Scale GenVideo Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19707/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Representations from Intermediate Encoder-blocks for Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19091/) (2024)
- [Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04279/) (2024)
- [Sparse autoencoders reveal selective remapping of visual concepts during adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05276/) (2024)
- [Interpreting CLIP with Hierarchical Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20578/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Neurons in Pretrained Text-Only Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01544/) (2023)
- [RenAIssance: A Survey into AI Text-to-Image Generation in the Era of Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00810/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Up-Sampling Operations in CNN-based Generative Network for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10461/) (2023)
- [Importance-based Neuron Allocation for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06569/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Language Models See Better When They Look Shallower](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21447/) (2025)
- [Seeing What Matters: Generalizable AI-generated Video Detection with Forensic-Oriented Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16802/) (2025)
- [Distinguish Any Fake Videos: Unleashing the Power of Large-scale Data and Motion Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15343/) (2024)
- [TIDE : Temporal-Aware Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Diffusion Transformers in Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07050/) (2025)
- [Causality Matters: How Temporal Information Emerges in Video Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11576/) (2025)
- [Preserving Forgery Artifacts: AI-Generated Video Detection at Native Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04634/) (2026)
- [Granular Concept Circuits: Toward a Fine-Grained Circuit Discovery for Concept Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01728/) (2025)
- [Video as Natural Augmentation: Towards Unified AI-Generated Image and Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21977/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As generated videos become increasingly realistic, reliable video forgery detection is increasingly important. Existing studies typically optimize and use video forgery detectors as black boxes, while the latent forgery-discriminative knowledge inside them remains largely unexplored. Instead of continuing to rely on resource-intensive full-model retraining to steadily improve detection performance, we ask whether video forgery detection can also be achieved by uncovering and activating sparse forensic knowledge within the detector. We find that forgery-discriminative knowledge is not uniformly distributed across the full representation space, but is concentrated in a sparse set of functionally specialized neurons. Based on this insight, we propose a video forgery-intrinsic neuron discovery (V-FIND) framework. V-FIND first localizes critical layers that exhibit pronounced discrepancies between real and forged videos, and then identifies latent anchor neurons that consistently carry forgery-discriminative signals, organizing them into a compact forensic subspace. With the original backbone frozen and only a lightweight linear classifier trained, this subspace still delivers strong detection performance across multiple external benchmarks for generated videos. Further neuron intervention experiments provide direct evidence for the functional specificity of the discovered neurons. Overall, these results suggest that video forgery detectors contain sparse, extractable, and reusable forgery-discriminative knowledge, offering a new perspective on understanding and exploiting their intrinsic forensic capability.
