CrossDF: improving cross-domain deepfake detection with deep information decomposition

Deepfake technology represents a serious risk to safety and public confidence. While current detection approaches perform well in identifying manipulations within datasets that utilize identical deepfake methods for both training and validation, they experience notable declines in accuracy when applied to cross-dataset situations, where unfamiliar deepfake techniques are encountered during testing. To tackle this issue, we propose a Deep Information Decomposition (DID) framework to improve Cross-dataset Deepfake Detection (CrossDF). Distinct from most existing deepfake detection approaches, our framework emphasizes high-level semantic attributes instead of focusing on particular visual anomalies. More specifically, it intrinsically decomposes facial representations into deepfake-relevant and unrelated components, leveraging only the deepfake-relevant features for classification between genuine and fabricated images. Furthermore, we introduce an adversarial mutual information minimization strategy that enhances the separability between these two types of information through decorrelation learning. This significantly improves the model's robustness to irrelevant variations and strengthens its generalization capability to previously unseen manipulation techniques. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed DID framework for cross-dataset deepfake detection. It achieves an AUC of 0.779 in cross-dataset evaluation from FF++ to CDF2 and improves the state-of-the-art AUC significantly from 0.669 to 0.802 on the diffusion-based Text-to-Image dataset.