LOGER: Local--Global Ensemble for Robust Deepfake Detection in the Wild

arXiv cs.CV / 4/7/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces LOGER, a two-branch local–global ensemble aimed at improving deepfake detection under real-world conditions with diverse manipulation types and image degradations.
  • A global branch uses heterogeneous vision foundation model backbones at multiple resolutions to capture holistic semantic and statistical anomalies, while a local branch performs patch-level analysis using Multiple Instance Learning with top-k pooling to focus on suspicious regions.
  • Dual-level supervision is applied at both the image-aggregated level and individual patch level to prevent local evidence from being diluted and to keep local responses discriminative.
  • The method leverages decorrelated errors between the global and local branches and combines them via logit-space fusion for more robust, generalizable predictions.
  • LOGER reports strong results, placing 2nd in the NTIRE 2026 Robust Deepfake Detection Challenge and showing robustness across multiple public benchmarks and degradation settings.

Abstract

Robust deepfake detection in the wild remains challenging due to the ever-growing variety of manipulation techniques and uncontrolled real-world degradations. Forensic cues for deepfake detection reside at two complementary levels: global-level anomalies in semantics and statistics that require holistic image understanding, and local-level forgery traces concentrated in manipulated regions that are easily diluted by global averaging. Since no single backbone or input scale can effectively cover both levels, we propose LOGER, a LOcal--Global Ensemble framework for Robust deepfake detection. The global branch employs heterogeneous vision foundation model backbones at multiple resolutions to capture holistic anomalies with diverse visual priors. The local branch performs patch-level modeling with a Multiple Instance Learning top-k aggregation strategy that selectively pools only the most suspicious regions, mitigating evidence dilution caused by the dominance of normal patches; dual-level supervision at both the aggregated image level and individual patch level keeps local responses discriminative. Because the two branches differ in both granularity and backbone, their errors are largely decorrelated, a property that logit-space fusion exploits for more robust prediction. LOGER achieves 2nd place in the NTIRE 2026 Robust Deepfake Detection Challenge, and further evaluation on multiple public benchmarks confirms its strong robustness and generalization across diverse manipulation methods and real-world degradation conditions.