Intersectional Invariant Learning for Fair Deepfake Detection

Uzoamaka Ezeakunne, Taiwo Olabamipe, Deevesh Jain, Xiuwen Liu

Deepfake detection models achieve high overall accuracy but exhibit large performance disparities across demographic groups, causing some groups to experience substantially higher false-positive rates than others. Existing fairness-aware methods address this by constraining model outputs to equalize group predictions, but do not tackle the underlying feature-level bias. As a result, models may still rely on demographic characteristics, such as skin texture, as indirect cues for detecting manipulated content. To address this problem, we propose Intersectional Invariant Learning (IIL), a framework that improves feature learning rather than only adjusting model outputs. IIL alternates between identifying the most challenging demographic partitions and learning features that remain consistent across those partitions. The framework also includes a false-positive-rate fairness objective and group-balanced sampling across six gender x skin-tone intersectional groups. We evaluate IIL on a large-scale fairness benchmark containing over one million images, 10 baseline detectors, and 21 fairness and utility metrics. Results show that IIL achieves Pareto-optimal performance, simultaneously…