Harnessing CLIP and DINO: An Uncertainty-Aware Cascaded Fusion Network for Generalizable Deepfake Image Detection
UCF-Net fuses CLIP and DINO features with entropy-based uncertainty weighting to improve generalizable deepfake image detection across generators.
Researchers propose UCF-Net, an uncertainty-aware cascaded fusion network that combines CLIP's language-aligned semantic priors with DINO's self-supervised visual-structure priors for deepfake detection. It aggregates hierarchical features across transformer depths via layer-wise expert modules and performs weighted fusion driven by entropy-derived uncertainty. The authors consolidate public deepfake datasets into a unified benchmark of roughly 4 million images plus a cross-generator set of over 8,000 faces from eight recent generators, where UCF-Net achieves the best mean AUC among evaluated methods, though zero-shot transfer remains challenging.