Specialist-Generalist Fusion with Outcome-Supervised Rationales for Deepfake Detection
Generalizable deepfake detection requires complementary forensic and semantic visual evidence. Specialist encoders capture subtle manipulation traces but can overfit to source-specific statistics, whereas MLLMs provide broader visual-semantic representations but may overlook fine forensic artifacts. We propose a two-stage detector in which an MLLM directly fuses patch-level features from a frozen forensic encoder with those from its native vision encoder and produces the authenticity decision itself. This specialist--generalist alignment provides the main cross-domain performance gain. We subsequently introduce outcome-supervised rationale tuning. The model generates a free-form visual ra...
| Authors | Benedikt Hopf, Zongwei Wu, Radu Timofte |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 29 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.