SAVe: Self-Supervised Audio-visual Deepfake Detection Exploiting Visual Artifacts and Audio-visual Misalignment
Sahibzada Adil Shahzad 1, Ammarah Hashmi 2,3, Junichi Yamagishi 2,4, Yusuke Yasuda 1, Yu Tsao 2, Chia-Wen Lin 4, Yan-Tsung Peng 3, Hsin-Min Wang 2
Published on arXiv
2603.25140
Output Integrity Attack
OWASP ML Top 10 — ML09
Key Finding
Achieves competitive in-domain performance and strong cross-dataset generalization using only real training videos
SAVe
Novel technique introduced
Multimodal deepfakes can exhibit subtle visual artifacts and cross-modal inconsistencies, which remain challenging to detect, especially when detectors are trained primarily on curated synthetic forgeries. Such synthetic dependence can introduce dataset and generator bias, limiting scalability and robustness to unseen manipulations. We propose SAVe, a self-supervised audio-visual deepfake detection framework that learns entirely on authentic videos. SAVe generates on-the-fly, identity-preserving, region-aware self-blended pseudo-manipulations to emulate tampering artifacts, enabling the model to learn complementary visual cues across multiple facial granularities. To capture cross-modal evidence, SAVe also models lip-speech synchronization via an audio-visual alignment component that detects temporal misalignment patterns characteristic of audio-visual forgeries. Experiments on FakeAVCeleb and AV-LipSync-TIMIT demonstrate competitive in-domain performance and strong cross-dataset generalization, highlighting self-supervised learning as a scalable paradigm for multimodal deepfake detection.
Key Contributions
- Self-supervised framework (SAVe) trained exclusively on authentic videos without labeled deepfake data
- Unifies visual artifact detection (FaceBlend, LipBlend, LowerFaceBlend) with audio-visual synchronization detection (AVSync)
- Demonstrates strong cross-dataset generalization on FakeAVCeleb and AV-LipSync-TIMIT benchmarks
🛡️ Threat Analysis
Primary contribution is detecting AI-generated audio-visual deepfakes (synthetic talking-face videos) — this is AI-generated content detection for output integrity and authentication. The paper builds a detector to distinguish real from fake multimodal content.