FAME: a lightweight spatio-temporal network for model attribution of face-swap deepfakes

Abstract

The widespread emergence of face-swap Deepfake videos poses growing risks to digital security, privacy, and media integrity, necessitating effective forensic tools for identifying the source of such manipulations. Although most prior research has focused primarily on binary Deepfake detection, the task of model attribution determining which generative model produced a given Deepfake remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce FAME (Fake Attribution via Multilevel Embeddings), a lightweight and efficient spatio-temporal framework designed to capture subtle generative artifacts specific to different face-swap models. FAME integrates spatial and temporal attention mechanisms to improve attribution accuracy while remaining computationally efficient. We evaluate our model on three challenging and diverse datasets, which include Deepfake Detection and Manipulation (DFDM), FaceForensics++ (FF++), and FakeAVCeleb (FAVCeleb). The evaluation results show that FAME consistently performs better than existing methods in both accuracy and runtime, highlighting its potential for deployment in real-world forensic and information security applications. The code and pretrained models will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/wasim004/FAME/.