# DBCF: Dual-Branch Complementary Fusion of Foundation Models for Generalized Deepfake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34720 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34720/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Detecting Deepfakes with Self-Blended Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08376/) (2022)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [The Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) Preview Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08854/) (2019)
- [UCF: Uncovering Common Features for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13949/) (2023)
- [DeepfakeBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01426/) (2023)
- [Exploring Temporal Coherence for More General Video Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06693/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Transcending Forgery Specificity with Latent Space Augmentation for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11278/) (2023)
- [NAS-FAS: Static-Dynamic Central Difference Network Search for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02062/) (2020)
- [AltFreezing for More General Video Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08317/) (2023)
- [Domain Generalization via Shuffled Style Assembly for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05340/) (2022)
- [UIA-ViT: Unsupervised Inconsistency-Aware Method based on Vision Transformer for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12752/) (2022)
- [PatchNet: A Simple Face Anti-Spoofing Framework via Fine-Grained Patch Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14325/) (2022)
- [FFAA: Multimodal Large Language Model based Explainable Open-World Face Forgery Analysis Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10072/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As image generation and editing technologies have progressed substantially, facial forgeries pose significant challenges to privacy and public safety. Due to limited ability to capture forgery cues, existing small-scale forgery detection models often struggle to generalize across various domains and unseen manipulations. To address this limitation, researchers have turned to large-scale foundation models, which can provide richer representations and better generalization. Nevertheless, relying on a single foundation model alone remains insufficient for effective forgery detection. While models like CLIP offer robust global semantic cues, they lack the capacity to capture detailed local facial features. In contrast, DINO excels at capturing local structural features of faces, but provides weaker global semantic context. To fully utilize the synergies among multiple foundation models, we propose a hierarchical multi-granular framework that integrates complementary pretrained representations. Specifically, a Global Context Branch (GCB) based on CLIP captures holistic semantic cues, while a Fine-grained Cue Branch (FCB) built on DINOv3 captures localized structural irregularities. In addition, we design a feature fusion module that enables parameter-efficient adaptation of the frozen foundation backbones by adaptively extracting and integrating complementary features from the two models. By jointly leveraging global context and fine-grained cues, our method learns more comprehensive forgery representations and achieves strong cross-manipulation performance. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the benefit of the proposed design, particularly under cross-dataset and cross-manipulation settings.