Split and Conquer Partial Deepfake Speech

TL;DR

This paper introduces a split-and-conquer framework for partial deepfake speech detection, improving localization and overall accuracy by separating boundary detection from segment classification.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two-stage approach with boundary detection and segment classification, along with a reflection-based multi-length training strategy for robustness.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on PartialSpoof benchmark.

Improves detection accuracy at multiple temporal resolutions.

Demonstrates robustness and generalization on Half-Truth dataset.

Abstract

Partial deepfake speech detection requires identifying manipulated regions that may occur within short temporal portions of an otherwise bona fide utterance, making the task particularly challenging for conventional utterance-level classifiers. We propose a split-and-conquer framework that decomposes the problem into two stages: boundary detection and segment-level classification. A dedicated boundary detector first identifies temporal transition points, allowing the audio signal to be divided into segments that are expected to contain acoustically consistent content. Each resulting segment is then evaluated independently to determine whether it corresponds to bona fide or fake speech. This formulation simplifies the learning objective by explicitly separating temporal localization from authenticity assessment, allowing each component to focus on a well-defined task. To further improve robustness, we introduce a reflection-based multi-length training strategy that converts variable-duration segments into several fixed input lengths, producing diverse feature-space representations. Each stage is trained using multiple configurations with different feature extractors and augmentation strategies, and their complementary predictions are fused to obtain improved final models. Experiments on the PartialSpoof benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple temporal resolutions as well as at the utterance level, with substantial improvements in the accurate detection and localization of spoofed regions. In addition, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Half-Truth dataset, further confirming the robustness and generalization capability of the framework.