Tracing Decoder Artifacts for Compact Synthetic Speech Screening

arXiv:2609.32050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in speech synthesis and voice cloning have increased the need for reliable synthetic-speech detection, yet high-accuracy detectors increasingly rely on large pretrained models that are costly to invoke on every recording. Rather than replacing such detectors, we investigate a compact front-end screen that processes all inputs cheaply and forwards only suspicious recordings for more expensive analysis. To enable lightweight screening without a large learned encoder, we exploit spectral traces introduced by speech-generation operations. We analyze how learned upsampling and inverse short-time Fourier transform synthesis can produce predictable spectral artifacts and measure their presence directly in generated waveforms. Because the strength of these artifacts varies across generators, we combine decoder-guided spectral measurements with complementary descriptors of short-time spectral shape and temporal variation in a compact gradient-boosted tree. Across seven speech generators and two human-speech sources, the proposed screen achieves an equal error rate of 0.021\% with an estimated model storage of 151 KiB. When used as the first stage of a simulated cascade with a 1.15-billion-parameter detector, it reduces estimated detection energy by 84.4\% while operating at a 0.050\% synthetic-speech miss rate, demonstrating the potential of decoder-guided acoustic evidence for low-cost front-end screening.

Abstract:Recent advances in speech synthesis and voice cloning have increased the need for reliable synthetic-speech detection, yet high-accuracy detectors increasingly rely on large pretrained models that are costly to invoke on every recording. Rather than replacing such detectors, we investigate a compact front-end screen that processes all inputs cheaply and forwards only suspicious recordings for more expensive analysis. To enable lightweight screening without a large learned encoder, we exploit spectral traces introduced by speech-generation operations. We analyze how learned upsampling and inverse short-time Fourier transform synthesis can produce predictable spectral artifacts and measure their presence directly in generated waveforms. Because the strength of these artifacts varies across generators, we combine decoder-guided spectral measurements with complementary descriptors of short-time spectral shape and temporal variation in a compact gradient-boosted tree. Across seven speech generators and two human-speech sources, the proposed screen achieves an equal error rate of 0.021\% with an estimated model storage of 151 KiB. When used as the first stage of a simulated cascade with a 1.15-billion-parameter detector, it reduces estimated detection energy by 84.4\% while operating at a 0.050\% synthetic-speech miss rate, demonstrating the potential of decoder-guided acoustic evidence for low-cost front-end screening.

Sound (cs.SD); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)

arXiv:2609.32050 [cs.SD]

(or arXiv:2609.32050v1 [cs.SD] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.32050 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Tracing Decoder Artifacts for Compact Synthetic Speech Screening

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