[Submitted on 27 Oct 2026]
Abstract:Deepfake detectors routinely achieve high aggregate accuracy while exhibiting substantial demographic disparities in their errors: false-positive rates differ by double digits across gender and skin tone. Most existing remedies require either full retraining with a fairness-aware objective or demographic-annotated training data, both impractical when only a pretrained checkpoint is available, while label-free post-hoc calibrators leave the detector’s weights unchanged. We introduce FYC (FPR-disparity Weight Perturbation and Youden Calibration), a two-stage post-hoc method that perturbs a detector’s weights under an FPR-disparity criterion, then calibrates a separate decision threshold for each demographic group – requiring no architectural changes and no full retraining. Evaluated against every detector benchmarked on AI-Face v2 across six intersectional gender x skin-tone groups, FYC outperforms the field on 18 of 21 reported fairness and utility metrics, including purpose-built fairness architectures, at a fraction of the training cost. We further identify why the choice of fairness criterion is critical: the original Demographic Parity objective used in prior weight-perturbation work is architecture-dependent and unpredictable, improving two of four evaluated architectures, leaving a third largely unchanged, and substantially degrading the fourth (PG-FDD), with no way to anticipate the outcome for a given checkpoint in advance. Conditioning the same objective on real images only – our FPR-disparity criterion – eliminates this unpredictability, improving fairness and accuracy jointly across all four architectures with no exceptions.
Submission history
From: Deevesh Jain [view email]
[v1] Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:22:21 UTC (251 KB)
