defense 2026

Which Face and Whose Identity? Solving the Dual Challenge of Deepfake Proactive Forensics in Multi-Face Scenarios

Lei Zhang 1, Zhiqing Guo 1, Dan Ma 1, Gaobo Yang 2

0 citations

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Published on arXiv

2604.26342

Output Integrity Attack

OWASP ML Top 10 — ML09

Key Finding

Achieves deepfake localization and identity traceability in complex multi-face scenarios, addressing limitations of single-face proactive forensics methods

DAWF

Novel technique introduced


Unlike single-face forgeries, deepfakes in complex multi-person interaction scenarios (such as group photos and multi-person meetings) more closely reflect real-world threats. Although existing proactive forensics solutions demonstrate good performance, they heavily rely on a "single-face" setting, making it difficult to effectively address the problems of deepfake localization and source tracing in complex multi-person environments. To address this challenge, we propose the Deep Attributable Watermarking Framework (DAWF). This framework adopts a novel multi-face encoder-decoder architecture that bypasses the cumbersome offline pre-processing steps of traditional forensics, facilitating efficient in-network parallel watermark embedding and cross-face collaborative processing. Crucially, we propose a selective regional supervision loss. This innovative mechanism guides the decoder to focus exclusively on the facial regions tampered with by deepfakes. Leveraging this mechanism alongside the embedded identity payloads, DAWF realizes the "which + who" goal, answering the dual questions of which facial region was forged and who was forged. Extensive experiments on challenging multi-face datasets show that DAWF achieves excellent deepfake localization and traceability in complex multi-person scenes.


Key Contributions

  • Multi-face encoder-decoder architecture for parallel watermark embedding across multiple faces
  • Selective regional supervision loss guiding decoder to focus on deepfake-tampered facial regions
  • Dual 'which + who' capability: localizing forged face regions and tracing source identities in multi-person scenarios

🛡️ Threat Analysis

Output Integrity Attack

Proposes a proactive watermarking framework for detecting and localizing deepfake manipulations in multi-face images and tracing the identity of forged faces — this is output integrity and content provenance. The watermark is embedded in the CONTENT (images) to verify authenticity and detect tampering, not in model weights for IP protection.


Details

Domains
visionmultimodal
Model Types
gancnn
Threat Tags
inference_time
Applications
deepfake detectionface forgery localizationmulti-person image forensicsidentity source tracing