On Improving Robustness of Deepfake Image Detectors

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 1 Jun 2026] On Improving Robustness of Deepfake Image Detectors Abu Taib Mohammed Shahjahan, Mohammad Mannan, Abdessamad Ben Hamza, Amr Youssef The rapid advancement of Generative AI has introduced remarkable opportunities while simultaneously raising critical concerns regarding content authenticity. While recent work has increasingly focused on improving the generalization of deepfake detectors across unseen generative models, their robustness against adversarial attacks remains limited. In particular, Abdullah et al. (IEEE SP 2024) evaluated eight detectors and demonstrated that most of them exhibit significant performance degradation under adversarial attacks. We also observed the same phenomenon by testing seven most recent state-of-the-art detectors. To address this problem, we propose a unified framework that integrates three complementary design principles without relying on adversarial training data: (i) higher-order statistical modeling in the frequency domain via Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)-based moment pooling up to fourth order, (ii) content-agnostic feature representations derived from noise residuals, and (iii) cross-scene generalization enforced through patch-level semantic disruption. A key insight underpinning our approach is that adversarial attacks primarily operate on low-order statistics and visual semantics, leaving higher-order residual-frequency characteristics, particularly kurtosis, largely unconstrained. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently improves robustness across six architecturally diverse detectors. Notably, we achieve up to 88.9% reduction in recall degradation on current adversarial benchmarks, and improve the best-performing recent detector (Yang et al., IEEE CVPR 2025) from 81.9% to 97.15% accuracy under attack. Overall, our method provides a principled, architecture-agnostic approach for improving deepfake detection robustness against current attacks. Comments: Accepted at Usenix Security 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.02797 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.02797v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.02797 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Mohammad Mannan [view email] [v1] Mon, 1 Jun 2026 19:03:32 UTC (25,878 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)