Adaptive Gated Deepfake Detection for Low-Resolution and Resource-Constrained Environments

Deepfake detection models often rely on high-quality inputs, fixed inference paths, and computationally expensive architectures, limiting their use in low-resolution and resource-constrained settings. This paper proposes AdaGate-DF, an adaptive gated deepfake detection framework that uses image-quality cues to route samples through a dual multi-exit system so high-quality images can exit earlier and save compute. We evaluated AdaGate-DF against MaD-CoRN, DefakeHop++, and ShuffleNetV2 on two benchmark datasets (Celeb-DF and FaceForensics++) under multiple configurations to test image resolution dependence and training and inference efficiency. On Celeb-DF, AdaGate-DF achieves an AUC of 0.9370, outperforming MaD-CoRN and DefakeHop++ while maintaining a low inference latency. Resolution-based testing shows consistent improvement as input resolution increases, reaching an AUC of 0.9708 at 384 by 384. The FaceForensics++ results highlight that AdaGate-DF remains effective under class imbalance, following competitive results with evaluated models. Overall, AdaGate-DF demonstrated a practical balance between detection performance, uncertainty-aware prediction, and computational efficiency for variable-quality deepfake detection.