# DF26: We Cannot Tell Fake From Real Anymore

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07369 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07369/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)
- [LTX-2: Efficient Joint Audio-Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03233/) (2026)
- [HunyuanVideo 1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18870/) (2025)
- [Orthogonal Subspace Decomposition for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15633/) (2024)
- [Deepfake-Eval-2024: A Multi-Modal In-the-Wild Benchmark of Deepfakes Circulated in 2024](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02857/) (2025)
- [Towards More General Video-based Deepfake Detection through Facial Component Guided Adaptation for Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05583/) (2024)
- [Skyra: AI-Generated Video Detection via Grounded Artifact Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15693/) (2025)
- [FSFM: A Generalizable Face Security Foundation Model via Self-Supervised Facial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12032/) (2024)
- [Celeb-DF++: A Large-scale Challenging Video DeepFake Benchmark for Generalizable Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18015/) (2025)
- [Deepfake Detection that Generalizes Across Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06248/) (2025)
- [Beyond Spatial Frequency: Pixel-wise Temporal Frequency-based Deepfake Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02398/) (2025)
- [TalkingHeadBench: A Multi-Modal Benchmark & Analysis of Talking-Head DeepFake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24866/) (2025)
- [MAVOS-DD: Multilingual Audio-Video Open-Set Deepfake Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11109/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce DF26, a novel benchmark for detecting AI-generated videos containing fully synthetic clips produced by recent text-to-video and image-to-video models. The videos capture single-person public-speaking scenarios, spanning direct-to-camera recordings, official statements, and studio interviews - 271 real and 2,420 synthetic videos generated by seven modern video models. The study on DF26 shows that human performance in detecting AI-generated videos, as well as state-of-the-art deepfake detectors, is close to random chance. Our results highlight the limitations of current evaluation protocols and motivate the need for benchmarks that explicitly measure robustness to modern generative model distribution shifts.