Danial Samadi Vahdati

Kirill Trapeznikov, Gabriel Mancino-Ball, Jonathan Li et al.

The proliferation of generative video technologies has intensified the need for reliable methods to detect and characterize synthetic media. To address this challenge, we organized the \href{https://safe-video-2025.dsri.org}{SAFE: Synthetic Video Detection Challenge}, co-located with the \textit{Authenticity and Provenance in the Age of Generative AI (APAI) Workshop }at ICCV 2025. The competition invited participants to develop and evaluate algorithms capable of distinguishing real from synthetic videos under fully blind evaluation conditions with over 600 submissions from 12 teams over a 90 day span. Hosted on the Hugging Face platform, the challenge comprised two primary tasks: (1) detection of synthetic video content generated by diverse state-of-the-art models, and (2) detection of synthetic content following common post-processing operations such as resizing, re-compression, motion blur and others. The challenge data consisted of 13 modern high quality synthetic video models with generated content matched to real videos from 21 diverse and challenge sources, all adding up to 20 hours of 6,000 video samples. This paper describes the challenge design, dataset construction, evaluation methodology, and outcomes, offering insights into the generalization and robustness of contemporary synthetic video detection methods. Our findings highlight measurable progress in cross-generator generalization but also persistent vulnerabilities to post-processing artifacts. https://safe-video-2025.dsri.org

Danial Samadi Vahdati, Tai D. Nguyen, Aref Azizpour et al.

Recent advances in generative AI have led to the development of techniques to generate visually realistic synthetic video. While a number of techniques have been developed to detect AI-generated synthetic images, in this paper we show that synthetic image detectors are unable to detect synthetic videos. We demonstrate that this is because synthetic video generators introduce substantially different traces than those left by image generators. Despite this, we show that synthetic video traces can be learned, and used to perform reliable synthetic video detection or generator source attribution even after H.264 re-compression. Furthermore, we demonstrate that while detecting videos from new generators through zero-shot transferability is challenging, accurate detection of videos from a new generator can be achieved through few-shot learning.

Danial Samadi Vahdati, Tai Duc Nguyen, Ekta Prashnani et al.

AI-based talking-head videoconferencing systems reduce bandwidth by sending a compact pose-expression latent and re-synthesizing RGB at the receiver, but this latent can be puppeteered, letting an attacker hijack a victim's likeness in real time. Because every frame is synthetic, deepfake and synthetic video detectors fail outright. To address this security problem, we exploit a key observation: the pose-expression latent inherently contains biometric information of the driving identity. Therefore, we introduce the first biometric leakage defense without ever looking at the reconstructed RGB video: a pose-conditioned, large-margin contrastive encoder that isolates persistent identity cues inside the transmitted latent while cancelling transient pose and expression. A simple cosine test on this disentangled embedding flags illicit identity swaps as the video is rendered. Our experiments on multiple talking-head generation models show that our method consistently outperforms existing puppeteering defenses, operates in real-time, and shows strong generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios.