English

Attention-based Mixture of Experts for Robust Speech Deepfake Detection

Sound 2025-09-23 v1

Abstract

AI-generated speech is becoming increasingly used in everyday life, powering virtual assistants, accessibility tools, and other applications. However, it is also being exploited for malicious purposes such as impersonation, misinformation, and biometric spoofing. As speech deepfakes become nearly indistinguishable from real human speech, the need for robust detection methods and effective countermeasures has become critically urgent. In this paper, we present the ISPL's submission to the SAFE challenge at IH&MMSec 2025, where our system ranked first across all tasks. Our solution introduces a novel approach to audio deepfake detection based on a Mixture of Experts architecture. The proposed system leverages multiple state-of-the-art detectors, combining their outputs through an attention-based gating network that dynamically weights each expert based on the input speech signal. In this design, each expert develops a specialized understanding of the shared training data by learning to capture different complementary aspects of the same input through inductive biases. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms existing approaches across multiple datasets. We further evaluate and analyze the performance of our system in the SAFE challenge.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.17585,
  title  = {Attention-based Mixture of Experts for Robust Speech Deepfake Detection},
  author = {Viola Negroni and Davide Salvi and Alessandro Ilic Mezza and Paolo Bestagini and Stefano Tubaro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.17585},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted @ IEEE WIFS 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:49:14.760Z