LAA-Net: Localized Artifact Attention Network for Quality-Agnostic and Generalizable Deepfake Detection
Authors: Dat Nguyen, Nesryne Mejri, Inder Pal Singh, Polina Kuleshova, Marcella Astrid, Anis Kacem, Enjie Ghorbel, Djamila Aouada

This paper introduces a novel approach for high-quality deepfake detection called Localized Artifact Attention Network (LAA-Net). Existing methods for high-quality deepfake detection are mainly based on a supervised binary classifier coupled with an implicit attention mechanism. As a result they do not generalize well to unseen manipulations. To handle this issue two main contributions are made. First an explicit attention mechanism within a multi-task learning framework is proposed. By combining heatmap-based and self-consistency attention strategies LAA-Net is forced to focus on a few small artifact-prone vulnerable regions. Second an Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (E-FPN) is proposed as a simple and effective mechanism for spreading discriminative low-level features into the final feature output with the advantage of limiting redundancy. Experiments performed on several benchmarks show the superiority of our approach in terms of Area Under the Curve (AUC) and Average Precision (AP). The code is available at https://github.com/10Ring/LAA-Net.