Explainable Deepfake Detection with Feature-robust Augmentation and Evidence-grounded Explanation Optimization

Explainable Deepfake Detection Challenge

The Explainable Deepfake Detection Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2026 is designed to benchmark this joint capability of classification metrics with semantic similarity, simplicity, and intent-aware grounding metrics that assess whether explanations identify the relevant manipulated entities and supporting visual evidence.

Scalable Perturbation-Based Explanations via Tradeoff-Conditioned Smooth Masking

Uncertainty-Aware Deepfake Detection via Multi-View Structural Learning

Security-critical biometric and forensic applications require accurate predictions and reliable confidence estimates, particularly under distribution shift. This challenge is especially acute for deepfake detection, where foundation-model-based detectors often exhibit overconfident predictions on out-of-distribution manipulations, which limits their suitability for operational deployment. We propose an uncertainty-aware deepfake detection framework that identifies manipulations through inconsistencies across complementary evidence sources. The framework integrates three streams: a visual stream based on an adapted CLIP encoder, a semantic stream that models consistency among facial attributes through differentiable constraints, and a structural stream that captures class-dependent dependency patterns between semantic and forensic features. To effectively combine these signals, we introduce Inter-Branch Disagreement Calibration (IBDC), a disagreement-aware uncertainty modeling mechanism that links predictive uncertainty to conflicts among evidence streams. Extensive cross-dataset experiments using FaceForensics++ as the training source demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art generalization across multiple out-of-distribution benchmarks while consistently improving calibration and selective prediction performance. These results show that combining complementary evidence with disagreement-aware uncertainty provides a robust foundation for trustworthy and well-calibrated deepfake detection under distribution shift.

Explainable AI for Deep Visual Recognition: Evaluation, Methods, and Open Challenges

This review explores the key techniques for explainability in deep visual recognition, including model-agnostic methods such as LIME and SHAP, model-specific approaches like saliency maps and feature visualization, and intrinsically interpretable models like decision trees and rule-based systems.

A Hybrid CNN–LSTM Framework with Explainable AI for Robust Deepfake Detection

Deepfakes pose growing risks to information integrity, yet many detectors perform well only on the datasets they were trained on and remain opaque to human analysts. A robust, explainable detection framework is presented that combines a CNN backbone for extracting spatial artifacts with an LSTM module for modeling temporal inconsistencies across frames. To make decisions auditable, the architecture incorporates Grad-CAM for spatial heatmaps, SHAP for quantitative feature attribution, and LIME for local surrogate explanations. The system was trained primarily on FaceForensics++ with stratified sampling and augmentation to reduce dataset bias and evaluated on multiple external benchmarks to assess cross-domain generalization. Experimental results show strong detection metrics, such as accuracy of 96.3%, precision of 95.8%, recall of 96.7%, and an F1-score of 96.2%, along with robust performance under JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, and FGSM adversarial attacks. By coupling high detection accuracy with transparent explanations, the proposed approach enhances forensic decision support and increases practical readiness for content verification systems.

VidForensics-M1: Meta-Detection Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Temporal Grounding for AI-Generated Video Forensics

Recent advances in video generation models have significantly improved the realism of synthetic videos, blurring the boundary between generated and authentic content and raising concerns about misinformation. Existing MLLM-based detectors mainly rely on supervised fine-tuning or label-level reinforcement learning, where coarse supervision limits generalization to unseen scenarios and emerging video generators. To overcome these limitations, we are the first to introduce \textbf{meta-detection} into AI-generated video detection, enabling reliable forgery detection by jointly optimizing predicted labels and supporting evidence within reinforcement learning. This paradigm requires reliable evidence signals and effective mechanisms to integrate them into label-level optimization. Textual rationales provide semantic descriptions of forgery artifacts, but their generation and verification depend on external models, making supervision vulnerable to hallucinations and semantic biases. In contrast, temporal grounding provides more objective and verifiable evidence, as manipulated intervals can be precisely controlled during forgery construction. Based on this insight, we propose an automated data construction pipeline that generates paired real-fake videos by replacing temporal segments with boundary-frame-conditioned video generation models. Furthermore, we introduce \textbf{Evidence-Guided Reward Redistribution}, which performs evidence-aware credit assignment by redistributing rewards among label-correct responses according to evidence quality. This preserves reliable label supervision while encouraging detectors to acquire fine-grained and verifiable forgery localization capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textbf{VidForensics-M1} effectively leverages verifiable temporal evidence to achieve robust and generalizable AI-generated video detection.