TRACE: Training-Free Partial Audio Deepfake Detection via Embedding Trajectory Analysis of Speech Foundation Models

Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems are rarely deployed as unchanged pre-trained models. They are often adapted through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or preference optimization such as DPO and GRPO. This raises a practical question for audio deepfake forensics: do fingerprints learned from a foundation generator remain valid after adaptation? We present GenTraceBench, a controlled benchmark spanning five TTS architectures, 16 pre-/post-training variants, and 49,728 utterances generated with fixed texts and speaker prompts. Under a train-on-foundation, test-on-adapted protocol, we evaluate binary detection, closed-set attribution, and open-set verification. DPO and GRPO generally preserve fingerprints, whereas some SFT and pre-training-data changes cause substantial drift; effect sizes vary across three forensic backbones. Repeated training runs confirm the largest W2V-BERT attribution drop, while a data-mixture control with comparable speech quality shows that composition change need not cause drift. In W2V-BERT verification, multi-shot enrollment reduces EER for the SFT condition from 44.4% to 11.0%, whereas the SingNet-only condition remains at or above 45% EER.

Large speech foundation models have shown strong potential for speech deepfake detection, but direct fine-tuning is limited by a mismatch between self-supervised pre-training objectives and spoof-specific artifacts. To address this, we propose a mix-frame post-training strategy to create localized spoof-oriented perturbations and use frame-level supervision to encourage the SSL model to learn local inconsistencies that are critical for robust spoof detection. On ASVspoof5, we achieve state-of-the-art EER 4.50% for a single model without data augmentation. On ASVspoof2021 LA/DF, it further achieves only 0.16% absolute EER gap between LA and DF, indicating strong and balanced robustness across distinct distortion conditions. These results show that supervised post-training provides an effective and practical way to adapt speech foundation models for robust deepfake detection.

Human speech production is constrained by physiology, giving rise to characteristic temporal structure on acoustic signals. We hypothesise that these constraints manifest as structured trajectory dynamics in the latent space of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models, and that synthetic speech violates them detectably. To test this hypothesis, we train a causal Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) next-frame predictor on bonafide speech only (Stage 1), using the deepfake-specialised SSL backbone Wav2Vec2-Large-AntiDeepfake, and compare against a static global-average-pooling baseline using identical features, thus isolating the contribution of temporal modelling. A supervised Stage 2, which trains a Multi-Layer Perceptron on the frozen LSTM internal states using labelled data, is included to characterise the role of spoof supervision. Our system achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance across six benchmarks: ASVspoof 2019/2021, Codecfake, In-the-Wild, MLAAD-EN, and Deepfake-Eval-2024, including best published EER on ASVspoof 2021 (0.75%) and, notably, Stage 1 trained on bonafide speech only surpasses the published supervised baseline from the same backbone on DE2024 (30.35%). On near-domain benchmarks, static and dynamic approaches perform comparably. On harder cross-corpus benchmarks with diverse synthesis methods, trajectory dynamics provide substantial gains, confirming that temporal physiological constraints carry detection signal beyond utterance-level statistics.