Uncovering Critical Features for Deepfake Detection through the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Amin, Lisan Al, Hossain, Md. Ismail, Nguyen, Thanh Thi, Jahan, Tasnim, Islam, Mahbubul, Quader, Faisal
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Amin, Lisan Al
Hossain, Md. Ismail
Nguyen, Thanh Thi
Jahan, Tasnim
Islam, Mahbubul
Quader, Faisal
author_facet Amin, Lisan Al
Hossain, Md. Ismail
Nguyen, Thanh Thi
Jahan, Tasnim
Islam, Mahbubul
Quader, Faisal
contents Recent advances in deepfake technology have created increasingly convincing synthetic media that poses significant challenges to information integrity and social trust. While current detection methods show promise, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood, and the large sizes of their models make them challenging to deploy in resource-limited environments. This study investigates the application of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) to deepfake detection, aiming to identify the key features crucial for recognizing deepfakes. We examine how neural networks can be efficiently pruned while maintaining high detection accuracy. Through extensive experiments with MesoNet, CNN-5, and ResNet-18 architectures on the OpenForensic and FaceForensics++ datasets, we find that deepfake detection networks contain winning tickets, i.e., subnetworks, that preserve performance even at substantial sparsity levels. Our results indicate that MesoNet retains 56.2% accuracy at 80% sparsity on the OpenForensic dataset, with only 3,000 parameters, which is about 90% of its baseline accuracy (62.6%). The results also show that our proposed LTH-based iterative magnitude pruning approach consistently outperforms one-shot pruning methods. Using Grad-CAM visualization, we analyze how pruned networks maintain their focus on critical facial regions for deepfake detection. Additionally, we demonstrate the transferability of winning tickets across datasets, suggesting potential for efficient, deployable deepfake detection systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_15636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uncovering Critical Features for Deepfake Detection through the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
Amin, Lisan Al
Hossain, Md. Ismail
Nguyen, Thanh Thi
Jahan, Tasnim
Islam, Mahbubul
Quader, Faisal
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in deepfake technology have created increasingly convincing synthetic media that poses significant challenges to information integrity and social trust. While current detection methods show promise, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood, and the large sizes of their models make them challenging to deploy in resource-limited environments. This study investigates the application of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) to deepfake detection, aiming to identify the key features crucial for recognizing deepfakes. We examine how neural networks can be efficiently pruned while maintaining high detection accuracy. Through extensive experiments with MesoNet, CNN-5, and ResNet-18 architectures on the OpenForensic and FaceForensics++ datasets, we find that deepfake detection networks contain winning tickets, i.e., subnetworks, that preserve performance even at substantial sparsity levels. Our results indicate that MesoNet retains 56.2% accuracy at 80% sparsity on the OpenForensic dataset, with only 3,000 parameters, which is about 90% of its baseline accuracy (62.6%). The results also show that our proposed LTH-based iterative magnitude pruning approach consistently outperforms one-shot pruning methods. Using Grad-CAM visualization, we analyze how pruned networks maintain their focus on critical facial regions for deepfake detection. Additionally, we demonstrate the transferability of winning tickets across datasets, suggesting potential for efficient, deployable deepfake detection systems.
title Uncovering Critical Features for Deepfake Detection through the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15636