Yechen Wang

Houmin Sun, Zi Hu, Linxi Li et al.

Modern audio is created by mixing stems from different sources, raising the question: can we independently watermark each stem and recover all watermarks after separation? We study a separation-first, multi-stream watermarking framework-embedding distinct information into stems using unique keys but a shared structure, mixing, separating, and decoding from each output. A naive pipeline (robust watermarking + off-the-shelf separation) yields poor bit recovery, showing robustness to generic distortions does not ensure robustness to separation artifacts. To enable this, we jointly train the watermark system and the separator in an end-to-end manner, encouraging the separator to preserve watermark cues while adapting embedding to separation-specific distortions. Experiments on speech+music and vocal+accompaniment mixtures show substantial gains in post-separation recovery while maintaining perceptual quality.

Linxi Li, Yuncong Yu, Qianwei Guo et al.

While audio deepfake detection has advanced significantly, representative detectors show limited generalization to synthetic sound effects. Existing environmental audio datasets such as EnvSDD provide important initial resources, but remain limited in scale and generation provenance for studying isolated sound-effect deepfakes. To support this direction, we present SynSFX, a large-scale corpus of 43374 clips (26452 synthetic, 16922 real) spanning 7 popular text-to-audio models.

Zhenshan Zhang, Xueping Zhang, Yechen Wang et al.

This paper presents the first study on the impact of audio watermarking on spoofing countermeasures. While anti-spoofing systems are essential for securing speech-based applications, the influence of widely used audio watermarking, originally designed for copyright protection, remains largely unexplored. We construct watermark-augmented training and evaluation datasets, named the Watermark-Spoofing dataset, by applying diverse handcrafted and neural watermarking methods to existing anti-spoofing datasets. Experiments show that watermarking consistently degrades anti-spoofing performance, with higher watermark density correlating with higher Equal Error Rates (EERs). To mitigate this, we propose the Knowledge-Preserving Watermark Learning (KPWL) framework, enabling models to adapt to watermark-induced shifts while preserving their original-domain spoofing detection capability. These findings reveal audio watermarking as a previously overlooked domain shift and establish the first benchmark for developing watermark-resilient anti-spoofing systems. All related protocols are publicly available at https://github.com/Alphawarheads/Watermark_Spoofing.git