Adapt to Scarcity: Few-Shot Deepfake Detection via Low-Rank Adaptation

The boundary between AI-generated images and real photographs is becoming increasingly narrow, thanks to the realism provided by contemporary generative models. Such technological progress necessitates the evolution of existing deepfake detection algorithms to counter new threats and protect the integrity of perceived reality. Although the prevailing approach among deepfake detection methodologies relies on large collections of generated and real data, the efficacy of these methods in adapting to scenarios characterized by data scarcity remains uncertain. This obstacle arises due to the introduction of novel generation algorithms and proprietary generative models that impose restrictions on access to large-scale datasets, thereby constraining the availability of generated images. In this paper, we first analyze how the performance of current deepfake methodologies, based on the CLIP embedding space, adapt in a few-shot situation over four state-of-the-art generators. Being the CLIP embedding space not specifically tailored for the task, a fine-tuning stage is desirable, although the amount of data needed is often unavailable in a data scarcity scenario. To address this issue and limit possible overfitting, we introduce a novel approach through the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) of the CLIP architecture, tailored for few-shot deepfake detection scenarios. Remarkably, the LoRA-modified CLIP, even when fine-tuned with merely 50 pairs of real and fake images, surpasses the performance of all evaluated deepfake detection models across the tested generators. Additionally, when LoRA CLIP is benchmarked against other models trained on 1,000 samples and evaluated on generative models not seen during training it exhibits superior generalization capabilities.