Researchers introduced PairCLIP-SWA, a deepfake image detector built on one OpenCLIP vision model. On the IEEE SP Cup 2025 benchmark, they report 97.04% accuracy, compared with 94.46% for a published three-model ensemble trained under the same protocol.
The researchers also found that checkpoint rankings on validation data could be misleading: on an OpenForensics-derived test set, the validation-selected checkpoint scored 88.85%, while the averaged model scored 94.76%. These are results from the paper’s experiments, not evidence of performance on every kind of deepfake.
Why it matters
For teams choosing a deepfake detector, the results suggest that relying on the single checkpoint with the best validation score can lead to weaker performance on separate test images; performance beyond these benchmarks remains unknown.
