Multi-level SSL Feature Gating for Audio Deepfake Detection

Abstract

Recent advancements in generative AI, particularly in speech synthesis, have enabled the generation of highly natural-sounding synthetic speech that closely mimics human voices. While these innovations hold promise for applications like assistive technologies, they also pose significant risks, including misuse for fraudulent activities, identity theft, and security threats. Current research on spoofing detection countermeasures remains limited by generalization to unseen deepfake attacks and languages. To address this, we propose a gating mechanism extracting relevant feature from the speech foundation XLS-R model as a front-end feature extractor. For downstream back-end classifier, we employ Multi-kernel gated Convolution (MultiConv) to capture both local and global speech artifacts. Additionally, we introduce Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) as a similarity metric to enforce diversity in learned features across different MultiConv layers. By integrating CKA with our gating mechanism, we hypothesize that each component helps improving the learning of distinct synthetic speech patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on in-domain benchmarks while generalizing robustly to out-of-domain datasets, including multilingual speech samples. This underscores its potential as a versatile solution for detecting evolving speech deepfake threats.