Manasi Chhibber, Jagabandhu Mishra, Tomi H. Kinnunen
Speech deepfake detection is predominantly treated as an opaque classification task where all temporal frames are aggregated equally. This ignores that different phonetic categories carry vastly different amounts of discriminative information. To address this, we propose a phoneme-guided cross-attention framework that transforms detection into an interpretable, phonetically grounded process. We factorize the spoofing posterior $P(\text{spoofed}\mid X, W)$, conditioned on the acoustic representation $X$ and the phonetic posteriorgram $W$. The resulting factorization can be written as $P(\text{spoofed} \mid X, W) = \sum_{i=1}^{M} w_i \cdot P(\text{spoofed} \mid X, Z = z_i)$, where $M$ denotes the number of phonetic classes, $P(\text{spoofed} \mid X, Z = z_i)$ is the spoofing probability for the $i$-th phonetic class $z_i$ conditioned on $X$, and each $w_i$ is the prevalence of phonetic class $z_i$ in the utterance. Our transformer-based architecture instantiates this through a cross-attention block in which phonetic queries selectively probe information in acoustic keys and values, with softmax-normalized pooling supplying explicit phone-presence weights. Unlike prior approaches that rely heavily on post-hoc explainability methods, our framework offers phonetic-explainability-by-design. We evaluate the framework on an LJSpeech-derived corpus, ASVspoof 2019 LA, and ASVspoof 5 Track 1. Per-phone importance rankings reveal that discriminative power concentrates on articulatory categories that generative models struggle to reproduce faithfully. Stops, fricatives, affricates, nasals, and silence-boundary closures rank most discriminative, while periodic vowels and semivowels rank lower. Beyond competitive performance, our model provides structural interpretability, yielding an inspectable per-articulatory category breakdown of the final verdict.