Jun 2026· arXiv.org· Vol abs/2606.31703· 0 citations· 34 references
Computer Science
TL;DR
Phantom is presented, a unified face-swap deepfake protection framework that jointly constrains perturbations in latent and spatial domains that generalizes to impersonation scenario, yielding up to 10.2% higher protection while improving perceptual fidelity.
Abstract
Face-swapping deepfakes pose an escalating threat to personal privacy by enabling unauthorized identity manipulation. While adversarial approaches have demonstrated success against black-box face recognition (FR) models, their applicability to face-swapping scenarios remains underexplored. In particular, reliance on fixed or random targets yields ambiguous latent guidance, and the lack of explicit spatial constraints causes perturbations to spill into identity-irrelevant regions. These issues are further exacerbated by identity-style disentanglement, which suppresses adversarial signals during deepfake generation. In this paper, we present Phantom, a unified face-swap deepfake protection framework that jointly constrains perturbations in latent and spatial domains. Phantom adaptively synthesizes identity-shifted yet attribute-preserving targets to guide identity-aware latent optimization, and applies masked perturbations confined to semantically relevant facial regions. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art face-swapping deepfakes demonstrate that Phantom improves protection success rates in dodging scenarios by 27.8%, 25.6%, and 16.6% on UniFace, INSwapper, and SimSwap, respectively, while also enhancing visual quality. Furthermore, Phantom generalizes to impersonation scenario, yielding up to 10.2% higher protection while improving perceptual fidelity. These results underscore the effectiveness of jointly leveraging latent and spatial constraints for robust and coherent facial privacy protection.
This work proposes SRAP, which combines per-channel truncated SVD refinement with an identity-importance mask at every optimization step, and demonstrates that SRAP substantially improves protected-image fidelity across all reported metrics while maintaining competitive identity-disruption performance.
Face-swapping has emerged as a promising approach to facial privacy protection, replacing a target individual's appearance with that of a donor while preserving non-facial context. The resulting images visually resemble the donor, and face recognition systems tend to suppress the target's match scores -- ostensibly satisfying privacy requirements. Empirical evaluation across a range of face-swapping models, however, reveals that significant target identity leakage still occurs. This raises a deeper question: why does leakage occur, and can it be predicted? We propose a linear stochastic model that treats face-swappers as transformations on the space of identity embeddings, providing an interpretable account of the leakage mechanism. The model is fit to empirical observations and used to derive testable predictions. The aim is to ground privacy assessments in principled, interpretable analysis, thus making formal privacy guarantees explainable -- and perfectible -- rather than purely observational.
This work proposes a robust, generalizable proactive face-swapping defense via semantic gradient divergence (SGD-Guard), and introduces an integrated feature gallery that uses CLIP features and a generalized identity feature, obtained by iteratively refining heterogeneous identity features into a homogeneous representation.
Do Seung-hyeok Back, Hyun Ki, Juwan Kim et al.· 0 citations
FDT-PC (Frequency Domain Transformation with Perceptual Constraints), a novel method that enhances adversarial transferability across different model architectures, is proposed, which achieves superior black-box attack performance on both CNNs and Vision Transformers, outperforming existing state-of-the-art input transformation methods.
Bo Li, Li Tang, Xin Jin et al.· ACM Transactions on Multimed...· 0 citations
Deepfakes, especially face-swapping attacks, pose significant challenges to authenticity, security, and ethics across science, engineering, and society. While most existing detection/tracing approaches operate post hoc, proactive defenses that aim to intervene before deepfake generation remain limited in terms of real-world effectiveness. In this paper, we present PhantomSeal, the first proactive defense to simultaneously protect both the identity and the context of users'images from being used in face-swapping attacks, while supporting forensic tracing. We present a novel cloaking technique that embeds a selected identity as a stealthy identifier. This mechanism steers the deepfake generation process toward producing content that resembles the chosen cloak identity, thereby preventing successful face-swapping while enabling effective feature-based forensic analysis. The effectiveness and robustness of PhantomSeal is demonstrated in extensive experiments across different face-swapping architectures and models. For example, it reduces the attack success rate of SimSwap, an advanced deepfake model, to 0.30%, and correctly identifies 97.97% of manipulated content. The source codes is available at https://github.com/LiangqinRen/PhantomSeal.
Liangqin Ren, Zeyan Liu, Ye Wang et al.· 0 citations
Adversarial examples generated on a surrogate deep neural network (DNN) can often successfully fool other black-box DNN models. This cross-model transferability poses serious security threats to DNNs in practical applications. Input transformation techniques are widely used to enhance adversarial transferability by increasing the diversity of input images. However, existing methods primarily rely on local operations with limited degrees of freedom (DOF), such as block-wise shuffling and resizing, overlooking global perspective transformations that naturally arise from viewpoint changes. In this work, we propose a Perspective-Invariant Attack (PIA), which introduces a multi-DOF vertex sampling strategy that systematically covers the perspective transformation hierarchy from 2-DOF translation to 8-DOF projective mapping. By generating geometrically diverse input variations, PIA effectively reduces overfitting of adversarial perturbations to the surrogate model, thereby improving adversarial transferability. We further propose PIA-Mix, a generic extension that maintains a complementary transformation pool and efficiently combines our perspective transformation with auxiliary methods for improved transferability. Extensive experiments involving various DNN architectures, advanced defense mechanisms, and multimodal large language models (LLMs) demonstrate that PIA and PIA-Mix outperform state-of-the-art transfer-based attacks.
Kaisheng Liang, Yiming Cao, Bin Xiao· IEEE Transactions on Informa...· 0 citations