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Awais Hussain Sani

Publications and source records attributed to Awais Hussain Sani.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

FakeParts: a New Family of AI-Generated DeepFakes

We introduce FakeParts, a new class of deepfakes characterized by subtle, localized manipulations to specific spatial regions or temporal segments of otherwise authentic videos. Unlike fully synthetic content, these partial manipulations - ranging from altered facial expressions to object substitutions and background modifications - blend seamlessly with real elements, making them particularly deceptive and difficult to detect. To address the critical gap in detection, we present FakePartsBench, the first large-scale benchmark specifically designed to capture the full spectrum of partial deepfakes. Comprising over 81K (including 44K FakeParts) videos with pixel- and frame-level manipulation annotations, our dataset enables comprehensive evaluation of detection methods. Our user studies demonstrate that FakeParts reduces human detection accuracy by up to 26% compared to traditional deepfakes, with similar performance degradation observed in state-of-the-art detection models. This work identifies an urgent vulnerability in current detectors and provides the necessary resources to develop methods robust to partial manipulations.

cs.CV↗

Improving French Synthetic Speech Quality via SSML Prosody Control

Despite recent advances, synthetic voices often lack expressiveness due to limited prosody control in commercial text-to-speech (TTS) systems. We introduce the first end-to-end pipeline that inserts Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tags into French text to control pitch, speaking rate, volume, and pause duration. We employ a cascaded architecture with two QLoRA-fine-tuned Qwen 2.5-7B models: one predicts phrase-break positions and the other performs regression on prosodic targets, generating commercial TTS-compatible SSML markup. Evaluated on a 14-hour French podcast corpus, our method achieves 99.2% F1 for break placement and reduces mean absolute error on pitch, rate, and volume by 25-40% compared with prompting-only large language models (LLMs) and a BiLSTM baseline. In perceptual evaluation involving 18 participants across over 9 hours of synthesized audio, SSML-enhanced speech generated by our pipeline significantly improves naturalness, with the mean opinion score increasing from 3.20 to 3.87 (p < 0.005). Additionally, 15 of 18 listeners preferred our enhanced synthesis. These results demonstrate substantial progress in bridging the expressiveness gap between synthetic and natural French speech. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/hi-paris/Prosody-Control-French-TTS.

cs.CL↗