Why Fake ? Unveiling the Semantic Vocabulary of Deepfake Detectors

Vazgken Vanian, Alexandros Doumanoglou, Dimitris Zarpalas

Deepfake (DF) technology poses a significant threat to information integrity, driving the need for robust detection methods. Most DF detectors only consider predicting a binary label for whether the input is real or fake, lacking the justification required for real-world applications like legal proceedings. Explainable DF Detection has emerged to address this limitation, but existing techniques frequently fall short by either relying on human annotations for precise artifact localization or generating superficially plausible textual explanations without grounding. This work investigates the use of post-hoc explainable AI (XAI) to analyze the decision-making process of state-of-the-art black-box DF detectors. Specifically, we employ Encoding-Decoding Direction Pairs (EDDP), a technique suitable for uncovering the concept space of DF detectors (their semantic vocabulary) as well as the mechanism for writing and reading concept information to and from internal representations. Our analysis reveals previously hidden real and fake features learned implicitly during detector training, offering nuanced explanations unattainable through conventional methods. This enables global model understanding, spatially aware concept localization, and counterfactual what-if analysis, all contributing to a deeper comprehension of DF detection strategies.