Viola Negroni

Viola Negroni, Davide Salvi, Daniele Ugo Leonzio et al.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of forensic similarity in the speech deepfake detection domain, which aims to determine whether two audio segments share the same underlying forensic traces. Our approach is inspired by prior work in the image domain. To transfer this idea to the audio domain, we propose a two-stage deep learning framework consisting of a Siamese-based feature extractor and a core decision module, referred to as the similarity network. The system goal to assess whether two speech samples originate from the same source by comparing their forensic characteristics. In practice, the model maps pairs of audio segments to a similarity score indicating whether they contain identical or different forensic traces. We evaluate the proposed method on the emerging task of source verification, demonstrating its ability to determine whether two speech samples were generated by the same model. In addition, we explore its applicability to audio splicing detection as a complementary use case. Experimental results show that the proposed approach generalizes well to previously unseen forensic traces, highlighting its robustness, flexibility, and practical relevance for digital audio forensics.

Viola Negroni, Davide Salvi, Alessandro Ilic Mezza et al.

Speech deepfakes pose a significant threat to personal security and content authenticity. Several detectors have been proposed in the literature, and one of the primary challenges these systems have to face is the generalization over unseen data to identify fake signals across a wide range of datasets. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for enhancing speech deepfake detection performance using a Mixture of Experts architecture. The Mixture of Experts framework is well-suited for the speech deepfake detection task due to its ability to specialize in different input types and handle data variability efficiently. This approach offers superior generalization and adaptability to unseen data compared to traditional single models or ensemble methods. Additionally, its modular structure supports scalable updates, making it more flexible in managing the evolving complexity of deepfake techniques while maintaining high detection accuracy. We propose an efficient, lightweight gating mechanism to dynamically assign expert weights for each input, optimizing detection performance. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of our proposed approach.

Viola Negroni, Davide Salvi, Paolo Bestagini et al.

Speech deepfake detection has recently gained significant attention within the multimedia forensics community. Related issues have also been explored, such as the identification of partially fake signals, i.e., tracks that include both real and fake speech segments. However, generating high-quality spliced audio is not as straightforward as it may appear. Spliced signals are typically created through basic signal concatenation. This process could introduce noticeable artifacts that can make the generated data easier to detect. We analyze spliced audio tracks resulting from signal concatenation, investigate their artifacts and assess whether such artifacts introduce any bias in existing datasets. Our findings reveal that by analyzing splicing artifacts, we can achieve a detection EER of 6.16% and 7.36% on PartialSpoof and HAD datasets, respectively, without needing to train any detector. These results underscore the complexities of generating reliable spliced audio data and lead to discussions that can help improve future research in this area.

Anmol Manjunath, Viola Negroni, Sara Mandelli et al.

Recent breakthroughs in deep learning and generative systems have significantly fostered the creation of synthetic media, as well as the local alteration of real content via the insertion of highly realistic synthetic manipulations. Local image manipulation, in particular, poses serious challenges to the integrity of digital content and societal trust. This problem is not only confined to multimedia data, but also extends to biological images included in scientific publications, like images depicting Western blots. In this work, we address the task of localizing synthetic manipulations in Western blot images. To discriminate between pristine and synthetic pixels of an analyzed image, we propose a synthetic detector that operates on small patches extracted from the image. We aggregate patch contributions to estimate a tampering heatmap, highlighting synthetic pixels out of pristine ones. Our methodology proves effective when tested over two manipulated Western blot image datasets, one altered automatically and the other manually by exploiting advanced AI-based image manipulation tools that are unknown at our training stage. We also explore the robustness of our method over an external dataset of other scientific images depicting different semantics, manipulated through unseen generation techniques.

Emma Coletta, Davide Salvi, Viola Negroni et al.

The rise of AI-driven generative models has enabled the creation of highly realistic speech deepfakes - synthetic audio signals that can imitate target speakers' voices - raising critical security concerns. Existing methods for detecting speech deepfakes primarily rely on supervised learning, which suffers from two critical limitations: limited generalization to unseen synthesis techniques and a lack of explainability. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing a novel interpretable one-class detection framework, which reframes speech deepfake detection as an anomaly detection task. Our model is trained exclusively on real speech to characterize its distribution, enabling the classification of out-of-distribution samples as synthetically generated. Additionally, our framework produces interpretable anomaly maps during inference, highlighting anomalous regions across both time and frequency domains. This is done through a Student-Teacher Feature Pyramid Matching system, enhanced with Discrepancy Scaling to improve generalization capabilities across unseen data distributions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to the considered baselines, validating the effectiveness of framing speech deepfake detection as an anomaly detection problem.