XSA-MAD: Cross-modal Semantic Alignment for Morphing Attack Detection

Abstract

Morphing attacks pose a serious threat to face recognition systems. However, existing image-based morphing attack detection (MAD) methods often generalize poorly to unseen generation techniques because they rely solely on visual cues. We propose XSA-MAD, a CLIP-based multimodal framework that explicitly models semantic inconsistencies between bona-fide and morphed faces. Morphing concepts are decomposed into four interpretable attributes, including identity, facial geometry, texture, and consistency, and are encoded as structured and attribute-aware textual representations. The image encoder is progressively aligned with this discriminative textual space, resulting in a unified semantic representation that captures generation-invariant and concept-level discrepancies between bona-fide and morph images. Experiments on MAD22 and MorDIFF, following training on SMDD, demonstrate strong generalization across diverse morphing principles. In particular, XSA-MAD achieves an equal error rate of 2.92% on GAN-based morphs and consistently outperforms existing methods under high-fidelity generative attacks.