LRD-Net: A Lightweight Real-Centered Detection Network for Cross-Domain Face Forgery Detection
Xuecen Zhang , Vipin Chaudhary
Published on arXiv
2604.10862
Output Integrity Attack
OWASP ML Top 10 — ML09
Key Finding
Achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain face forgery detection accuracy with only 2.63M parameters (9x parameter reduction), 8x faster training, and 10x faster inference compared to conventional methods
LRD-Net
Novel technique introduced
The rapid advancement of diffusion-based generative models has made face forgery detection a critical challenge in digital forensics. Current detection methods face two fundamental limitations: poor cross-domain generalization when encountering unseen forgery types, and substantial computational overhead that hinders deployment on resource-constrained devices. We propose LRD-Net (Lightweight Real-centered Detection Network), a novel framework that addresses both challenges simultaneously. Unlike existing dual-branch approaches that process spatial and frequency information independently, LRD-Net adopts a sequential frequency-guided architecture where a lightweight Multi-Scale Wavelet Guidance Module generates attention signals that condition a MobileNetV3-based spatial backbone. This design enables effective exploitation of frequency-domain cues while avoiding the redundancy of parallel feature extraction. Furthermore, LRD-Net employs a real-centered learning strategy with exponential moving average prototype updates and drift regularization, anchoring representations around authentic facial images rather than modeling diverse forgery patterns. Extensive experiments on the DiFF benchmark demonstrate that LRD-Net achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain detection accuracy, consistently outperforming existing methods. Critically, LRD-Net accomplishes this with only 2.63M parameters - approximately 9x fewer than conventional approaches - while achieving over 8x faster training and nearly 10x faster inference. These results demonstrate that robust cross-domain face forgery detection can be achieved without sacrificing computational efficiency, making LRD-Net suitable for real-time deployment in mobile authentication systems and resource-constrained environments.
Key Contributions
- Sequential frequency-guided architecture using Multi-Scale Wavelet Guidance Module with MobileNetV3 backbone (2.63M parameters, 9x smaller than conventional approaches)
- Real-centered learning strategy with exponential moving average prototype updates and drift regularization, anchoring on authentic faces rather than modeling diverse forgery patterns
- Achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain detection on DiFF benchmark with 8x faster training and 10x faster inference, suitable for mobile deployment
🛡️ Threat Analysis
Detects AI-generated/manipulated facial images (deepfakes) across multiple generation methods (diffusion models, face editing, I2I, T2I) — this is AI-generated content detection and authentication of visual content, which falls under output integrity.