RLDF: A Region-Level Deepfake Dataset and Benchmark for Partial-Face Manipulation Detection

Existing deepfake detection models are built upon manipu- lated images that are tampered with either exclusively fully swapped or fully synthesised faces, which leads us to an open question: Can off-the-shelf deepfake models detect manipulation effectively while tampering is confined to a local facial sub-region? To fill this gap, we introduce RLDF (Region-Level Deepfake), the first dataset for region-level deepfake evaluation. Employing the proposed region-aware partial swap synthesis model, we generate over 2M par- tial face-swap images by using eight face-swapping meth- ods. Altogether, we considered seven face regions, among which there are four discrete regions (eye, nose, mouth and eyebrow) and four composite facial regions (eye and nose; eye, nose and mouth; eye, nose, mouth and eye- brow; and full face). In addition, we define three evalu- ation protocols and benchmark 12 state-of-the-art detectors across the five popular standard cross-dataset evaluations, DF40, and the proposed RLDF, providing a comprehen- sive audit of where and why existing detectors underper- formed. Our evaluation reveals that existing detectors fail to generalize consistently across partial facial regions, re- sulting in an overall drop of 10.5% AUC and 10% accu- racy under region-level evaluation. Further, we propose a mask-guided cross-attention model as a baseline approach that can effectively detect region-level manipulation. The proposed dataset, code, and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/RLDF-Dataset/RLDF.