Gaobo Yang

Chen Sun, Haiyang Sun, Zhiqing Guo et al.

Deepfakes pose significant security and privacy threats through malicious facial manipulations. While robust watermarking can aid in authenticity verification and source tracking, existing methods often lack the sufficient robustness against Deepfake manipulations. Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in image generation, enabling the seamless fusion of watermark with image during generation. In this study, we propose a novel robust watermarking framework based on diffusion model, called DiffMark. By modifying the training and sampling scheme, we take the facial image and watermark as conditions to guide the diffusion model to progressively denoise and generate corresponding watermarked image. In the construction of facial condition, we weight the facial image by a timestep-dependent factor that gradually reduces the guidance intensity with the decrease of noise, thus better adapting to the sampling process of diffusion model. To achieve the fusion of watermark condition, we introduce a cross information fusion (CIF) module that leverages a learnable embedding table to adaptively extract watermark features and integrates them with image features via cross-attention. To enhance the robustness of the watermark against Deepfake manipulations, we integrate a frozen autoencoder during training phase to simulate Deepfake manipulations. Additionally, we introduce Deepfake-resistant guidance that employs specific Deepfake model to adversarially guide the diffusion sampling process to generate more robust watermarked images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DiffMark on typical Deepfakes. Our code will be available at https://github.com/vpsg-research/DiffMark.

Zhiqing Guo, Dongdong Xi, Songlin Li et al.

Image manipulation localization (IML) faces a fundamental trade-off between minimizing annotation cost and achieving fine-grained localization accuracy. Existing fully-supervised IML methods depend heavily on dense pixel-level mask annotations, which limits scalability to large datasets or real-world deployment.In contrast, the majority of existing weakly-supervised IML approaches are based on image-level labels, which greatly reduce annotation effort but typically lack precise spatial localization. To address this dilemma, we propose BoxPromptIML, a novel weakly-supervised IML framework that effectively balances annotation cost and localization performance. Specifically, we propose a coarse region annotation strategy, which can generate relatively accurate manipulation masks at lower cost. To improve model efficiency and facilitate deployment, we further design an efficient lightweight student model, which learns to perform fine-grained localization through knowledge distillation from a fixed teacher model based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Moreover, inspired by the human subconscious memory mechanism, our feature fusion module employs a dual-guidance strategy that actively contextualizes recalled prototypical patterns with real-time observational cues derived from the input. Instead of passive feature extraction, this strategy enables a dynamic process of knowledge recollection, where long-term memory is adapted to the specific context of the current image, significantly enhancing localization accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets show that BoxPromptIML outperforms or rivals fully-supervised models, while maintaining strong generalization, low annotation cost, and efficient deployment characteristics.

Lixin Jia, Haiyang Sun, Zhiqing Guo et al.

With the rapid evolution of deepfake technologies and the wide dissemination of digital media, personal privacy is facing increasingly serious security threats. Deepfake proactive forensics, which involves embedding imperceptible watermarks to enable reliable source tracking, serves as a crucial defense against these threats. Although existing methods show strong forensic ability, they rely on an idealized assumption of single watermark embedding, which proves impractical in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we formally define and demonstrate the existence of Multi-Embedding Attacks (MEA) for the first time. When a previously protected image undergoes additional rounds of watermark embedding, the original forensic watermark can be destroyed or removed, rendering the entire proactive forensic mechanism ineffective. To address this vulnerability, we propose a general training paradigm named Adversarial Interference Simulation (AIS). Rather than modifying the network architecture, AIS explicitly simulates MEA scenarios during fine-tuning and introduces a resilience-driven loss function to enforce the learning of sparse and stable watermark representations. Our method enables the model to maintain the ability to extract the original watermark correctly even after a second embedding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our plug-and-play AIS training paradigm significantly enhances the robustness of various existing methods against MEA.

Songlin Li, Guofeng Yu, Zhiqing Guo et al.

Deep learning-based image manipulation localization (IML) methods have achieved remarkable performance in recent years, but typically rely on large-scale pixel-level annotated datasets. To address the challenge of acquiring high-quality annotations, some recent weakly supervised methods utilize image-level labels to segment manipulated regions. However, the performance is still limited due to insufficient supervision signals. In this study, we explore a form of weak supervision that improves the annotation efficiency and detection performance, namely scribble annotation supervision. We re-annotated mainstream IML datasets with scribble labels and propose the first scribble-based IML (Sc-IML) dataset. Additionally, we propose the first scribble-based weakly supervised IML framework. Specifically, we employ self-supervised training with a structural consistency loss to encourage the model to produce consistent predictions under multi-scale and augmented inputs. In addition, we propose a prior-aware feature modulation module (PFMM) that adaptively integrates prior information from both manipulated and authentic regions for dynamic feature adjustment, further enhancing feature discriminability and prediction consistency in complex scenes. We also propose a gated adaptive fusion module (GAFM) that utilizes gating mechanisms to regulate information flow during feature fusion, guiding the model toward emphasizing potential tampered regions. Finally, we propose a confidence-aware entropy minimization loss (${\mathcal{L}}_{ {CEM }}$). This loss dynamically regularizes predictions in weakly annotated or unlabeled regions based on model uncertainty, effectively suppressing unreliable predictions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing fully supervised approaches in terms of average performance both in-distribution and out-of-distribution.

Zhiqing Guo, Gaobo Yang, Jiyou Chen et al.

With the proliferation of face image manipulation (FIM) techniques such as Face2Face and Deepfake, more fake face images are spreading over the internet, which brings serious challenges to public confidence. Face image forgery detection has made considerable progresses in exposing specific FIM, but it is still in scarcity of a robust fake face detector to expose face image forgeries under complex scenarios such as with further compression, blurring, scaling, etc. Due to the relatively fixed structure, convolutional neural network (CNN) tends to learn image content representations. However, CNN should learn subtle manipulation traces for image forensics tasks. Thus, we propose an adaptive manipulation traces extraction network (AMTEN), which serves as pre-processing to suppress image content and highlight manipulation traces. AMTEN exploits an adaptive convolution layer to predict manipulation traces in the image, which are reused in subsequent layers to maximize manipulation artifacts by updating weights during the back-propagation pass. A fake face detector, namely AMTENnet, is constructed by integrating AMTEN with CNN. Experimental results prove that the proposed AMTEN achieves desirable pre-processing. When detecting fake face images generated by various FIM techniques, AMTENnet achieves an average accuracy up to 98.52%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art works. When detecting face images with unknown post-processing operations, the detector also achieves an average accuracy of 95.17%.