Source-linked AI summary
FrePGAN: Robust Deepfake Detection Using Frequency-level Perturbations
Yonghyun Jeong, Doyeon Kim, Youngmin Ro, Jongwon Choi
TL;DR
Deepfake detectors can overfit to frequency-level artifacts, limiting detection of images from unknown categories or GAN models. FrePGAN generates perturbation maps and jointly updates them with a classifier, achieving state-of-the-art performance across known and unseen settings.
Problem
Frequency-level artifacts vary across GAN models and categories, causing detectors to overfit training settings and limiting generalization to unseen deepfakes.
Method
FrePGAN generates frequency-level perturbation maps for real and fake images while alternating updates with a deepfake classifier.
Results
The model achieves state-of-the-art performance in both known and unseen settings.
Takeaways & Limitations
Reducing domain-specific frequency artifacts while retaining general image-level irregularities supports robust detection across unknown categories, GAN models, manipulations, and resizing.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Various deepfake detectors have been proposed, but challenges still exist to detect images of unknown categories or GAN models outside of the training settings. Such issues arise from the overfitting issue, which we discover from our own analysis and the previous studies to originate from the frequency-level artifacts in generated images. We find that ignoring the frequency-level artifacts can improve the detector's generalization across various GAN models, but it can reduce the model's performance for the trained GAN models. Thus, we design a framework to generalize the deepfake detector for both the known and unseen GAN models. Our framework generates the frequency-level perturbation maps to make the generated images indistinguishable from the real images. By updating the deepfake detector along with the training of the perturbation generator, our model is trained to detect the frequency-level artifacts at the initial iterations and consider the image-level irregularities at the last iterations. For experiments, we design new test scenarios varying from the training settings in GAN models, color manipulations, and object categories. Numerous experiments validate the state-of-the-art performance of our deepfake detector.
Introduction
Deepfake detectors can overfit to frequency artifacts that vary across GAN models and object categories. FrePGAN addresses this by perturbing frequency-level artifacts while retaining image-level irregularities, achieving strong performance in known and unseen settings.
- Frequency artifacts are easily detected but vary by GAN model and object category, encouraging detectors to overfit training settings.
- The proposed framework combines FrePGAN with a deepfake classifier to reduce domain-specific frequency artifacts and detect general image-level irregularities.
- The framework is evaluated under known settings and unseen categories, models, and manipulations.
- The model achieves state-of-the-art performance in both known and unseen settings.
- FrePGAN generates perturbation maps that are added to real and fake images to reduce the effect of domain-specific artifacts.
Related Work
Prior deepfake-detection research uses physiological, image-based, and frequency-based cues. These approaches address artifacts, lighting, prediction errors, and spectral traces, but reported limitations include sensitivity to non-facial domains, resizing, and post-processing.
- Existing detectors are categorized into physiological feature-based, image-based, and frequency-based approaches.
- Face-focused methods use facial features, head poses, and eye-blinking cues but can be ineffective in non-facial domains.
- Image-based methods analyze compression, demosaicing, lighting, prediction errors, and RGB inconsistencies across manipulations.
- Frequency-based studies use spectral traces, prediction-residue variance, Fourier transforms, singular-value decomposition, and GAN-specific fingerprints.
Deepfake Detection Framework
The deepfake detection framework combines FrePGAN with a classifier. FrePGAN generates frequency-level perturbation maps for both real and fake images, while the classifier distinguishes them after artifact reduction.
- FrePGAN generates frequency-level perturbation maps that reduce the effect of domain-specific artifacts in real and fake images.
- The deepfake classifier distinguishes real and fake images after the perturbation maps are added.
Training of Deepfake Detection Framework
The framework trains FrePGAN and the deepfake classifier together with alternating updates. Early training can exploit easy frequency artifacts, while later perturbations encourage features that generalize across GAN models.
- FrePGAN and the deepfake classifier are trained in one iteration rather than as a sequence to capture varied perturbation-map properties.
- Alternating updates expand classifier input variety and enhance generalization.
- The overall framework balances domain-specific frequency artifacts with general image-level irregularity.
- Initially, the classifier uses easily detected frequency artifacts because FrePGAN has not yet learned suitable perturbations.
- After FrePGAN learns perturbations that confuse real and fake images, the classifier extracts features that work across GAN types.
Frequency Perturbation GAN
FrePGAN uses frequency-domain perturbations and adversarial training to suppress GAN-specific artifacts before classification. Its generator transforms images into frequency maps, produces perturbations, and is trained with a discriminator and compression objective.
- Architecture: FrePGAN combines a perturbation map generator with a perturbation discriminator and deepfake classifier.The generator produces maps for both real and fake images, while the classifier distinguishes them using pixel-level information.
- Frequency Perturbation: Frequency-domain processing targets high-frequency artifacts that distinguish real and fake images and can cause detector overfitting.The generator receives FFT-transformed images because the artifacts mainly occur in high-frequency components.
- Frequency Perturbation: The generator applies FFT, frequency-level generation, and inverse FFT to produce a pixel-level perturbation map matching the input image size.The frequency map doubles the channel count by separating real and imaginary components, then the generated map is transformed back to pixel space.
- Adversarial Training: Adversarial training makes perturbed images difficult for the perturbation discriminator to distinguish from real images.For real inputs, the ideal perturbation is empty; for fake inputs, perturbations should make their distribution resemble real images.
- Adversarial Training: The perturbation generator minimizes adversarial and compression losses while alternating updates with the perturbation discriminator.The compression term limits perturbation magnitude, and the adversarial and discriminator losses are optimized through alternating training steps.
Deepfake Classifier
The deepfake classifier distinguishes generated images from real images using perturbed inputs and is trained with cross-entropy loss. Its training procedure minimizes the classifier loss over paired real and fake labels.
- The deepfake classifier is a binary classification network that distinguishes generated fake images from real images.
- Perturbation-generated images are supplied to the classifier instead of raw images because the classifier detects informative frequency-level features.
- The classifier uses cross-entropy loss over real and fake labels paired with their respective input samples.
Deepfake Image Prediction
At inference, the trained perturbation generator modifies each new image before the trained classifier produces its real-or-fake prediction. The final decision is therefore based on the classifier's output for the perturbed image.
- For a new test image, the trained perturbation generator estimates a perturbation map and adds it to the image.
- The resulting perturbed image is fed into the trained deepfake classifier.
- The classifier's output provides the final real-or-fake prediction.
Implementation Details
The implementation uses established neural architectures for perturbation generation, discrimination, and classification, with Adam optimization and a 20-epoch training schedule.
- VGG is used for the perturbation map generator, while DCGAN's discriminator architecture is used for the perturbation discriminator.
- The deepfake classifier uses an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet architecture.
- Adam trains the perturbation generator and discriminator, with learning rates of 10^-4 and 10^-1, respectively.
- Training runs for 20 epochs.
Experimental Results
Experiments evaluate FrePGAN across known and unseen categories, models, manipulations, and resolutions. The model consistently demonstrates robust detection, including strong cross-model and resizing performance.
- Experimental Setup: The evaluation covers known and unseen domains, including manipulated faces, resized faces, unknown categories, and unknown generative models.Average precision and accuracy are used for comparison with image-based and frequency-based state-of-the-art detectors.
- Experimental Setup: The experiments use ProGAN training data and test across multiple datasets, GAN architectures, object categories, and image resolutions.Unknown-category tests use horse images, while manipulation and resizing experiments use 1,024 × 1,024 face data.
- Manipulation Robustness: FrePGAN achieves superior robustness under seven image manipulations, including hue, brightness, saturation, gamma, contrast, blur, and rotation.The experiments use manipulated ProGAN face images at 1,024 × 1,024 resolution.
- Resizing Robustness: 100% performance is maintained from 1,024 × 1,024 through 256 × 256, while performance remains at least 97.8% at 128 × 128 and 64 × 64.FrePGAN outperforms all compared models across the five tested resolutions.
- Unknown Categories: FrePGAN is the most robust model across 20 unknown categories, even as the number of training classes and input types varies.The results indicate that the model detects both the tested category and other categories across varied testing environments.
- Unknown Models: Across eight generative models, FrePGAN achieves the highest accuracy and average precision for ProGAN, StyleGAN, GauGAN, and Deepfake.It performs similarly when trained with one category or four categories, while the supplied passage continues with results for four additional models.
Ablation Study
Ablation and visualization experiments show that frequency-level perturbation generation, adversarial learning, and compression loss jointly support generalization. The perturbations reduce frequency artifacts while largely preserving pixel-level appearance.
- Ablation Study: The complete framework reaches the best ablation performance, with the frequency-level generator, adversarial learning, and compression loss used together.The reported best performance is (91.8, 94.6).
- Ablation Study: Using compression and adversarial losses together improves generalization, while replacing the frequency-level generator with a pixel-level generator sharply reduces performance.The ablation attributes the difference to the quality of the generated perturbation maps.
- Perturbation Visualization: Adding perturbation maps greatly reduces the power-spectrum difference between real and fake images caused by high-frequency artifacts.The visualization supports the framework’s goal of making real and fake images more similar at the frequency level.
- Perturbation Visualization: Perturbation maps preserve the pixel-level image and two-dimensional power spectrum while magnifying high-frequency components in the one-dimensional spectrum.The resulting one-dimensional spectrum becomes similar to that of fake images containing frequency-level artifacts.
Conclusion
FrePGAN targets deepfake-detector generalization by reducing domain-specific frequency artifacts and jointly training the perturbation generator and classifier. Experiments support robust detection across unknown categories, GAN models, manipulations, and resizing.
- Conclusion: FrePGAN generates perturbations that reduce domain-specific artifacts in generated images and supports generalized detection across varied testing scenarios.The tested scenarios include unknown categories, GAN models, manipulations, and resizing.
- Conclusion: Alternate updates of the deepfake classifier and perturbation generator are validated as helpful for improving detector generalization.The framework uses perturbation generation and compression losses during training.