Unifying Locality of KANs and Feature Drift Compensation for Data-free Continual Face Forgery Detection

Abstract: The rapid advancements in face forgery techniques necessitate that detectors continuously adapt to new forgery methods, thus situating face forgery detection within a continual learning paradigm. However, when detectors learn new forgery types, their performance on previous types often degrades rapidly, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) utilize locally plastic splines as their activation functions, enabling them to learn new tasks by modifying only local regions of the functions while leaving other areas unaffected. Therefore, they are naturally suitable for addressing catastrophic forgetting. However, KANs have two significant limitations: 1) the splines are ineffective for modeling high-dimensional images, while alternative activation functions that are suitable for images lack the essential property of locality; 2) in continual learning, when features from different domains overlap, the mapping of different domains to distinct curve regions always collapses due to repeated modifications of the same regions. In this paper, we propose a KAN-based Continual Face Forgery Detection (KAN-CFD) framework, which includes a Domain-Group KAN Detector (DG-KD) and a data-free replay Feature Separation strategy via KAN Drift Compensation Projection (FS-KDCP). DG-KD enables KANs to fit high-dimensional image inputs while preserving locality and local plasticity. FS-KDCP avoids the overlap of the KAN input spaces without using data from prior tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance while notably reducing forgetting.