Feature Extraction Matters More: An Effective and Efficient Universal Deepfake Disruptor

Face manipulation can modify a victim’s facial attributes, e.g., age or hair color, in an image, which is an important component of DeepFakes. Adversarial examples are an emerging approach to combat the threat of visual misinformation to society. To efficiently protect facial images from being forged, designing a universal face anti-manipulation disruptor is essential. However, existing works treat deepfake disruption as an end-to-end process, ignoring the functional difference between feature extraction and image reconstruction. In this work, we propose a novel Feature-Output ensemble UNiversal Disruptor (FOUND) against face manipulation networks, which explores a new opinion considering attacking feature-extraction (encoding) modules as the critical task in deepfake disruption. We conduct an effective two-stage disruption process. We first perform ensemble disruption on multi-model encoders, maximizing the Wasserstein distance between features before and after the adversarial attack. Then develop a gradient-ensemble strategy to enhance the disruption effect by simplifying the complex optimization problem of disrupting ensemble end-to-end models. Extensive experiments indicate that one FOUND generated with a few facial images can successfully disrupt multiple face manipulation models on cross-attribute and cross-face images, surpassing state-of-the-art universal disruptors in both success rate and efficiency.