ActivityForensics: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Localizing Manipulated Activity in Videos

arXiv cs.CV / 4/7/2026

📰 NewsSignals & Early TrendsIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper introduces ActivityForensics, a new large-scale benchmark focused on temporal forgery localization for activity-level manipulations rather than appearance-only edits like face swapping or object removal.
  • ActivityForensics includes 6K+ seamlessly blended forged video segments that maintain strong visual consistency, making them difficult for humans to distinguish from authentic footage.
  • The authors propose Temporal Artifact Diffuser (TADiff), a baseline method that uses a diffusion-based feature regularizer to reveal subtle artifact cues for localization.
  • They define comprehensive evaluation protocols spanning intra-domain, cross-domain, and open-world settings, and benchmark multiple state-of-the-art forgery localization approaches.
  • The dataset and code are released publicly to support and accelerate future research on detecting manipulated human activities in videos.

Abstract

Temporal forgery localization aims to temporally identify manipulated segments in videos. Most existing benchmarks focus on appearance-level forgeries, such as face swapping and object removal. However, recent advances in video generation have driven the emergence of activity-level forgeries that modify human actions to distort event semantics, resulting in highly deceptive forgeries that critically undermine media authenticity and public trust. To overcome this issue, we introduce ActivityForensics, the first large-scale benchmark for localizing manipulated activity in videos. It contains over 6K forged video segments that are seamlessly blended into the video context, rendering high visual consistency that makes them almost indistinguishable from authentic content to the human eye. We further propose Temporal Artifact Diffuser (TADiff), a simple yet effective baseline that exposes artifact cues through a diffusion-based feature regularizer. Based on ActivityForensics, we introduce comprehensive evaluation protocols covering intra-domain, cross-domain, and open-world settings, and benchmark a wide range of state-of-the-art forgery localizers to facilitate future research. The dataset and code are available at https://activityforensics.github.io.