Shared-Private Cross-Modal Discrepancy Learning for Imbalanced Multi-Source Audio-Visual Deepfake Detection

Qiwu Wen, Jahangir Alam

Audio-visual deepfake detectors are often trained under a single dataset or manipulation regime, but multi-source training collections may contain heterogeneous attacks and uneven source distributions. Training separate detectors for each source is inefficient, while a single shared detector may be biased toward dominant source-specific patterns. We study known-source imbalanced multi-source audio-visual deepfake detection using FakeAVCeleb and LAV-DF, where source identity is supplied during training and inference. To address this setting, we build on the Multi-Scale Cross-Modal Transformer Encoder (MSCT) and propose Pre-MSCT Shared-Private Feature Fusion. Our method routes \texttt{[CLS]}-augmented audio and visual tokens into a shared stream and source-specific private streams before the first MSCT block, while retaining its internal multi-scale self-attention (MSSA), differential cross-modal attention (DCA), and feed-forward operations. The shared stream models cross-source reusable evidence, while the private streams retain source-dependent residual variations. A domain-aware gated residual fusion module injects selected private evidence into the shared representation for the…