Although effective deepfake detection models have been developed in recent years, recent studies have revealed that these models can result in unfair performance disparities among demographic groups, such as race and gender. This can lead to particular groups facing unfair targeting or exclusion from detection, potentially allowing misclassified deepfakes to manipulate public opinion and undermine trust in the model. The existing method for addressing this problem is providing a fair loss function. It shows good fairness performance for intra-domain evaluation but does not maintain fairness for cross-domain testing. This highlights the significance of fairness generalization in the fight against deepfakes. In this work, we propose the first method to address the fairness generalization problem in deepfake detection by simultaneously considering features, loss, and optimization aspects. Our method employs disentanglement learning to extract demographic and domain-agnostic forgery features, fusing them to encourage fair learning across a flattened loss landscape. Extensive experiments on prominent deepfake datasets demonstrate our method's effectiveness, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches in preserving fairness during cross-domain deepfake detection. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/Fairness-Generalization

Despite the development of effective deepfake detectors in recent years, recent studies have demonstrated that biases in the data used to train these detectors can lead to disparities in detection accuracy across different races and genders. This can result in different groups being unfairly targeted or excluded from detection, allowing undetected deepfakes to manipulate public opinion and erode trust in a deepfake detection model. While existing studies have focused on evaluating fairness of deepfake detectors, to the best of our knowledge, no method has been developed to encourage fairness in deepfake detection at the algorithm level. In this work, we make the first attempt to improve deepfake detection fairness by proposing novel loss functions that handle both the setting where demographic information (eg, annotations of race and gender) is available as well as the case where this information is absent. Fundamentally, both approaches can be used to convert many existing deepfake detectors into ones that encourages fairness. Extensive experiments on four deepfake datasets and five deepfake detectors demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach in improving deepfake detection fairness. Our code is available at https://github.com/littlejuyan/DF_Fairness.