CAD: A General Multimodal Framework for Video Deepfake Detection via Cross-Modal Alignment and Distillation

Abstract: The rapid emergence of multimodal deepfakes (visual and auditory content are manipulated in concert) undermines the reliability of existing detectors that rely solely on modality-specific artifacts or cross-modal inconsistencies. In this work, we first demonstrate that modality-specific forensic traces (e.g., face-swap artifacts or spectral distortions) and modality-shared semantic misalignments (e.g., lip-speech asynchrony) offer complementary evidence, and that neglecting either aspect limits detection performance. Existing approaches either naively fuse modality-specific features without reconciling their conflicting characteristics or focus predominantly on semantic misalignment at the expense of modality-specific fine-grained artifact cues. To address these shortcomings, we propose a general multimodal framework for video deepfake detection via Cross-Modal Alignment and Distillation (CAD). CAD comprises two core components: 1) Cross-modal alignment that identifies inconsistencies in high-level semantic synchronization (e.g., lip-speech mismatches); 2) Cross-modal distillation that mitigates feature conflicts during fusion while preserving modality-specific forensic traces (e.g., spectral distortions in synthetic audio). Extensive experiments on both multimodal and unimodal (e.g., image-only/video-only)deepfake benchmarks demonstrate that CAD significantly outperforms previous methods, validating the necessity of harmonious integration of multimodal complementary information.