Are DeepFakes Realistic Enough? Exploring Semantic Mismatch as a Novel Challenge

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Deshmukh, Sharayu Nilesh, Hambarde, Kailash A., Costa, Joana C., Proença, Hugo, Roxo, Tiago
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Deshmukh, Sharayu Nilesh
Hambarde, Kailash A.
Costa, Joana C.
Proença, Hugo
Roxo, Tiago
author_facet Deshmukh, Sharayu Nilesh
Hambarde, Kailash A.
Costa, Joana C.
Proença, Hugo
Roxo, Tiago
contents Current DeepFake detection scenarios are mostly binary, yet data manipulation can vary across audio, video, or both, whose variability is not captured in binary settings. Four-class audio-visual formulations address this by discriminating manipulation type, but introduce a unresolved problem: models may rely solely on data source integrity to detect DeepFakes without evaluating their semantic consistency. If the DeepFake origin is not in the data source but in its content, can semantic mismatch be assessed by the state-of-the-art? This paper proposes a new evaluation setup, extending the four-class formulation by explicitly modeling semantic-level inconsistency between authentic modalities with the introduction a new class: Real Audio-Real Video with Semantic Mismatch (RARV-SMM). We assess the robustness of state-of-the-art models in this new realistic DeepFake setting, using the FakeAVCeleb dataset, highlighting the limitations of existing approaches when faced with semantic mismatch data. We further introduce three RARV-SMM variants that expose distinct architectural vulnerabilities as audio-visual divergence increases. We also propose a semantic reinforcement strategy that incorporates the semantic mismatch class and ImageBind embeddings to improve DeepFake detection in both our proposed and state-of-the-art settings, on FakeAVCeleb and LAV-DF, paving the way to more realistic DeepFake detectors. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_28022
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Are DeepFakes Realistic Enough? Exploring Semantic Mismatch as a Novel Challenge
Deshmukh, Sharayu Nilesh
Hambarde, Kailash A.
Costa, Joana C.
Proença, Hugo
Roxo, Tiago
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Current DeepFake detection scenarios are mostly binary, yet data manipulation can vary across audio, video, or both, whose variability is not captured in binary settings. Four-class audio-visual formulations address this by discriminating manipulation type, but introduce a unresolved problem: models may rely solely on data source integrity to detect DeepFakes without evaluating their semantic consistency. If the DeepFake origin is not in the data source but in its content, can semantic mismatch be assessed by the state-of-the-art? This paper proposes a new evaluation setup, extending the four-class formulation by explicitly modeling semantic-level inconsistency between authentic modalities with the introduction a new class: Real Audio-Real Video with Semantic Mismatch (RARV-SMM). We assess the robustness of state-of-the-art models in this new realistic DeepFake setting, using the FakeAVCeleb dataset, highlighting the limitations of existing approaches when faced with semantic mismatch data. We further introduce three RARV-SMM variants that expose distinct architectural vulnerabilities as audio-visual divergence increases. We also propose a semantic reinforcement strategy that incorporates the semantic mismatch class and ImageBind embeddings to improve DeepFake detection in both our proposed and state-of-the-art settings, on FakeAVCeleb and LAV-DF, paving the way to more realistic DeepFake detectors. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/.
title Are DeepFakes Realistic Enough? Exploring Semantic Mismatch as a Novel Challenge
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.28022