Redundant Semantic Environment Filling via Misleading-Learning for Fair Deepfake Detection

Abstract

Detecting falsified faces generated by Deepfake technology is essential for safeguarding trust in digital communication and protecting individuals. However, current detectors often suffer from a dual-overfitting: they become overly specialized in both specific forgery fingerprints and particular demographic attributes. Critically, most existing methods overlook the latter issue, which results in poor fairness: faces from certain demographic groups, such as different genders or ethnicities, are consequently more difficult to reliably detect. To address this challenge, we propose a novel strategy called misleading-learning, which populates the latent space with a multitude of redundant environments. By exposing the detector to a sufficiently rich and balanced variety of high-level information for demographic fairness, our approach mitigates demographic bias while maintaining a high detection performance level. We conduct extensive evaluations on fairness, intra-domain detection, cross-domain generalization, and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves superior fairness and generalization compared to state-of-the-art approaches.