defense 2026

RCDN: Real-Centered Detection Network for Robust Face Forgery Identification

Wyatt McCurdy 1, Xin Zhang 1, Yuqi Song 1, Min Gao 2

0 citations · 22 references · arXiv

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Published on arXiv

2601.12111

Output Integrity Attack

OWASP ML Top 10 — ML09

Key Finding

RCDN achieves the highest cross/in-domain stability ratio among evaluated baselines, significantly reducing generalization gap on the DiFF dataset across face editing, image-to-image, and text-to-image forgery types

RCDN (Real-Centered Detection Network)

Novel technique introduced


Image forgery has become a critical threat with the rapid proliferation of AI-based generation tools, which make it increasingly easy to synthesize realistic but fraudulent facial content. Existing detection methods achieve near-perfect performance when training and testing are conducted within the same domain, yet their effectiveness deteriorates substantially in crossdomain scenarios. This limitation is problematic, as new forgery techniques continuously emerge and detectors must remain reliable against unseen manipulations. To address this challenge, we propose the Real-Centered Detection Network (RCDN), a frequency spatial convolutional neural networks(CNN) framework with an Xception backbone that anchors its representation space around authentic facial images. Instead of modeling the diverse and evolving patterns of forgeries, RCDN emphasizes the consistency of real images, leveraging a dual-branch architecture and a real centered loss design to enhance robustness under distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on the DiFF dataset, focusing on three representative forgery types (FE, I2I, T2I), demonstrate that RCDN achieves both state-of-the-art in-domain accuracy and significantly stronger cross-domain generalization. Notably, RCDN reduces the generalization gap compared to leading baselines and achieves the highest cross/in-domain stability ratio, highlighting its potential as a practical solution for defending against evolving and unseen image forgery techniques.


Key Contributions

  • Real-Centered Detection Network (RCDN) with a dual-branch frequency-spatial CNN architecture (Xception backbone) that anchors its representation space around authentic facial images rather than modeling diverse forgery patterns
  • Real-centered loss design that improves cross-domain generalization under distribution shifts caused by unseen forgery techniques
  • Achieves the highest cross/in-domain stability ratio on the DiFF dataset across three diffusion-based forgery types (FE, I2I, T2I)

🛡️ Threat Analysis

Output Integrity Attack

Proposes a novel deepfake/face forgery detection architecture (RCDN) targeting AI-generated facial images (FE, I2I, T2I), which is squarely within ML09's scope of AI-generated content detection and output integrity verification.


Details

Domains
vision
Model Types
cnndiffusion
Threat Tags
inference_timedigital
Datasets
DiFF
Applications
deepfake detectionface forgery detectionai-generated image detection