Enhanced Deepfake Detection Through Multi-Attention Mechanisms: A Comprehensive Framework for Synthetic Media Identification
Research Article  ·  Published: 24 November 2025
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ICCK Transactions on Intelligent Systematics
Volume 2, Issue 4, 2025: 248-258
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Enhanced Deepfake Detection Through Multi-Attention Mechanisms: A Comprehensive Framework for Synthetic Media Identification

1 Department of Computer Science, Graz University of Technology, Graz 8010, Austria
2 Department of AI and Software, Gachon University, Seongnam-si 13120, Republic of Korea
* Corresponding Author: Farhan Ali, [email protected]
Volume 2, Issue 4
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Abstract

The proliferation of deepfake technology poses significant threats to digital media authenticity, necessitating robust intelligent detection systems to combat manipulated content. This paper presents a novel attention-based framework for deepfake detection that systematically integrates multiple complementary attention mechanisms to enhance discriminative feature learning. Our approach combines spatial attention, multi-head self-attention, and channel attention modules with a VGG-16 backbone to capture comprehensive representations across different feature spaces. The spatial attention mechanism focuses on discriminative facial regions, while multi-head self-attention captures long-range spatial dependencies and global contextual relationships. Channel attention further refines feature representations by emphasizing the most informative channels for detection. Extensive experiments on FaceForensics++ and Celeb-DF datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our progressive attention integration strategy. The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with 92.67% accuracy and 99.30% Area Under the Curve (AUC) on FF++, while maintaining solid generalization capabilities with 82.35% accuracy and 82.7% AUC on the challenging Celeb-DF dataset. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the contribution of each attention component and justify key design choices, including the optimal 3×3 kernel size for spatial attention. Comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that our approach achieves competitive detection performance while maintaining architectural simplicity and computational efficiency. The modular design of our framework provides interpretability and flexibility for deployment across various computational environments, making it suitable for practical artificial media detection applications.

Graphical Abstract

Enhanced Deepfake Detection Through Multi-Attention Mechanisms: A Comprehensive Framework for Synthetic Media Identification

Keywords

deepfake detection multi-head self-attention synthetic media detection facial manipulation detection

Data Availability Statement

Data will be made available on request.

Funding

This work was supported without any funding.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Ethical Approval and Consent to Participate

Not applicable.

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Cite This Article

APA Style
Ali, F., & Ghazanfar, Z. (2025). Enhanced Deepfake Detection Through Multi-Attention Mechanisms: A Comprehensive Framework for Synthetic Media Identification. ICCK Transactions on Intelligent Systematics, 2(4), 248-258. https://doi.org/10.62762/TIS.2025.756872
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TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ali, Farhan
AU  - Ghazanfar, Zainab
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/11/24
TI  - Enhanced Deepfake Detection Through Multi-Attention Mechanisms: A Comprehensive Framework for Synthetic Media Identification
JO  - ICCK Transactions on Intelligent Systematics
T2  - ICCK Transactions on Intelligent Systematics
JF  - ICCK Transactions on Intelligent Systematics
VL  - 2
IS  - 4
SP  - 248
EP  - 258
DO  - 10.62762/TIS.2025.756872
UR  - https://www.icck.org/article/abs/TIS.2025.756872
KW  - deepfake detection
KW  - multi-head self-attention
KW  - synthetic media detection
KW  - facial manipulation detection
AB  - The proliferation of deepfake technology poses significant threats to digital media authenticity, necessitating robust intelligent detection systems to combat manipulated content. This paper presents a novel attention-based framework for deepfake detection that systematically integrates multiple complementary attention mechanisms to enhance discriminative feature learning. Our approach combines spatial attention, multi-head self-attention, and channel attention modules with a VGG-16 backbone to capture comprehensive representations across different feature spaces. The spatial attention mechanism focuses on discriminative facial regions, while multi-head self-attention captures long-range spatial dependencies and global contextual relationships. Channel attention further refines feature representations by emphasizing the most informative channels for detection. Extensive experiments on FaceForensics++ and Celeb-DF datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our progressive attention integration strategy. The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with 92.67% accuracy and 99.30% Area Under the Curve (AUC) on FF++, while maintaining solid generalization capabilities with 82.35% accuracy and 82.7% AUC on the challenging Celeb-DF dataset. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the contribution of each attention component and justify key design choices, including the optimal 3×3 kernel size for spatial attention. Comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that our approach achieves competitive detection performance while maintaining architectural simplicity and computational efficiency. The modular design of our framework provides interpretability and flexibility for deployment across various computational environments, making it suitable for practical artificial media detection applications.
SN  - 3068-5079
PB  - Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge
LA  - English
ER  - 
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@article{Ali2025Enhanced,
  author = {Farhan Ali and Zainab Ghazanfar},
  title = {Enhanced Deepfake Detection Through Multi-Attention Mechanisms: A Comprehensive Framework for Synthetic Media Identification},
  journal = {ICCK Transactions on Intelligent Systematics},
  year = {2025},
  volume = {2},
  number = {4},
  pages = {248-258},
  doi = {10.62762/TIS.2025.756872},
  url = {https://www.icck.org/article/abs/TIS.2025.756872},
  abstract = {The proliferation of deepfake technology poses significant threats to digital media authenticity, necessitating robust intelligent detection systems to combat manipulated content. This paper presents a novel attention-based framework for deepfake detection that systematically integrates multiple complementary attention mechanisms to enhance discriminative feature learning. Our approach combines spatial attention, multi-head self-attention, and channel attention modules with a VGG-16 backbone to capture comprehensive representations across different feature spaces. The spatial attention mechanism focuses on discriminative facial regions, while multi-head self-attention captures long-range spatial dependencies and global contextual relationships. Channel attention further refines feature representations by emphasizing the most informative channels for detection. Extensive experiments on FaceForensics++ and Celeb-DF datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our progressive attention integration strategy. The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with 92.67\% accuracy and 99.30\% Area Under the Curve (AUC) on FF++, while maintaining solid generalization capabilities with 82.35\% accuracy and 82.7\% AUC on the challenging Celeb-DF dataset. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the contribution of each attention component and justify key design choices, including the optimal 3×3 kernel size for spatial attention. Comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that our approach achieves competitive detection performance while maintaining architectural simplicity and computational efficiency. The modular design of our framework provides interpretability and flexibility for deployment across various computational environments, making it suitable for practical artificial media detection applications.},
  keywords = {deepfake detection, multi-head self-attention, synthetic media detection, facial manipulation detection},
  issn = {3068-5079},
  publisher = {Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge}
}

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