Adaptive Compression and Targeted Perturbation: A Unified Framework for Generalized Audio Deepfake Detection

Recent advances in generative audio models have enabled highly realistic synthetic speech, increasing the importance of reliable audio deepfake detection (ADD) systems. While prior studies have primarily focused on adversarially optimized perturbations, the robustness of ADD systems under realistic signal transformations remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate the impact of audio watermarking on ADD systems by treating watermarking as a structured, non-adversarial perturbation rather than a conventional attack mechanism. Using a watermark-based evaluation framework built upon WavMark, we evaluate multiple self-supervised learning (SSL), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Graph Neural Netrowk (GNN)-based ADD models across several benchmark datasets. Beyond conventional detection metrics, we further analyze watermark-induced representation shifts using Fréchet Distance, cosine similarity, and L2 distance in the embedding space. Experimental results reveal a strong dataset-dependent behavior: watermarking causes substantial performance degradation on ASVspoof 2021 LA and DF, while exhibiting limited impact on ASVspoof 2024, FoR, and ITW. Moreover, large embedding-space shifts are strongly associated with severe detection degradation, suggesting that watermark-induced perturbations can substantially alter the feature representations relied upon by current ADD systems. These findings demonstrate that benign signal transformations designed for content protection can expose previously overlooked robustness vulnerabilities in audio deepfake detection systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziqian0925/wm-ADD-robustness.git

Achieving robust generalization against unseen attacks remains a challenge in Audio Deepfake Detection (ADD), driven by the rapid evolution of generative models. To address this, we propose a framework centered on hard sample classification. The core idea is that a model capable of distinguishing challenging hard samples is inherently equipped to handle simpler cases effectively. We investigate multiple reconstruction paradigms, identifying the diffusion-based method as optimal for generating hard samples. Furthermore, we leverage multi-layer feature aggregation and introduce a Regularization-Assisted Contrastive Learning (RACL) objective to enhance generalizability. Experiments demonstrate the superior generalization of our approach, with our best model achieving a significant reduction in the average Equal Error Rate (EER) compared to the baseline.

Audio deepfake detection (ADD) must remain effective when new spoofing attacks emerge after deployment. Emerging audio language model (ALM)-based ADD methods are built on predefined supervision from ground-truth labels or verified forensic rationales. However, this paradigm overlooks an ALM's own mistakes, which indicate where targeted supervision is most needed. To this end, we first introduce evolving spoofing environments for ALM-based ADD, where a new attack becomes dominant while previously observed attacks persist. Motivated by the above learning-from-mistakes perspective, we further propose SE-ADD, a self-evolving framework that iteratively adapts an ALM via low-rank adaptation (LoRA) using mistake-driven supervision built from its verdicts and self-generated forensic cues. All training samples receive direct authenticity supervision, while misclassified ones receive additional cue-augmented supervision. As verdicts and cues are regenerated by the updated ALM, the resulting supervision evolves accordingly. Experiments on two ALMs demonstrate the effectiveness of SE-ADD in generalizing to unseen attacks, reducing the equal error rate (EER) from $36.72\%$ to $7.52\%$ for Qwen2-Audio and from $19.93\%$ to $3.97\%$ for MOSS-Audio.