arXiv Computation and Language

The Voiceprint Fallacy: Why Voices Are Not Unique Biometric Imprints

The article critiques the notion that a person's voice is a stable, unique biometric trace—termed a voiceprint—by reviewing historical, forensic, and technological evidence. It argues that voices are highly dynamic and context-dependent, and that the voiceprint metaphor misrepresents probabilistic speaker information as a fixed identity marker. The authors emphasize that speaker recognition should account for within-speaker variability, domain mismatch, and synthetic manipulation rather than rely on an assumed stable voiceprint.

arXiv AI
1d ago

VIPBench: A Human-Aligned Benchmark for Voice Identity Perception in the Age of Voice Cloning

VIPBench is a new benchmark that measures how humans perceive voice identity, using 124,876 same-or-different judgments from 1,290 listeners on 9,800 recording pairs involving real voices, voice clones, and morphed voices of 100 public figures. It defines four tasks to evaluate how well speaker‑representation models align with human judgments, including predicting majority responses and assessing similarity across real and synthetic recordings. Eleven publicly available speech models were evaluated, showing that listeners often misidentify cloned voices and that no model reaches the noise ceiling, with the best explaining only 61% of the explainable variance.

By Xudong Tang, Matthew Groh
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Voice "Cloning" is Style Transfer

arXiv:2605.16578v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificially generated speech is increasingly embedded in everyday life. Voice cloning in particular enables applications where identity pres...

By Kaitlyn Zhou, Federico Bianchi, Martijn Bartelds, Anna Pot, Yongchan Kwon, James Zou
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Beyond EER: Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Information Leakage in Speaker De-Identification

The paper "Beyond EER: Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Information Leakage in Speaker De-Identification" argues that evaluating speaker de-identification systems solely by Equal Error Rate (EER) is insufficient. It proposes a holistic framework using five complementary metrics—EER, soft biometric leakage score, cumulative match characteristic re-identification analysis, canonical correlation analysis with Procrustes embedding alignment, and intelligibility via word error rate and semantic similarity—to capture independent dimensions of information leakage. Experiments on five IARPA ARTS SDID systems show that these metrics reveal leakage that a single metric would miss.

By Seungmin Seo, Oleg Aulov, P. Jonathon Phillips, Kevin Mangold, Jonathan Eskin
arXiv AI
Oct 28

From Voiceprints to User Entities: Online Speaker-Memory Construction for Multi-User Spoken Agents

The paper introduces EvoSpeakerMem, a training‑free layer that enables online speaker‑memory construction for multi‑user spoken agents by routing speakers, updating acoustic states, and partitioning memory writes and retrievals. It also presents LoCoMo‑ID, a benchmark with hidden speaker identities, speaker‑sensitive queries, and recording‑condition shifts to evaluate such systems. Experiments show that gated updating improves identity‑gated QA while maintaining zero wrong‑user authorizations, though a fragmentation–contamination trade‑off remains.

By Yucong Zhang, Cancan Li, Bo Xiao, Ke Zeng, Ming Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

Leveraging Avatar Fingerprinting: A Multi-Generator Photorealistic Talking-Head Public Database and Benchmark

The paper introduces AVAPrintDB, a new public multi‑generator talking‑head avatar database designed for avatar fingerprinting, comprising data from two audiovisual corpora and three state‑of‑the‑art generators (GAGAvatar, LivePortrait, HunyuanPortrait). It also defines a standardized benchmark that evaluates existing avatar fingerprinting systems and explores new methods based on Foundation Models such as DINOv2 and CLIP, while analyzing performance under generator and dataset shift. The authors find that identity‑related motion cues persist across synthetic avatars, yet current fingerprinting systems are highly sensitive to changes in synthesis pipelines and source domains.

By Laura Pedrouzo-Rodriguez, Luis F. Gomez, Ruben Tolosana, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Roberto Daza, Aythami Morales, Julian Fierrez
arXiv AI
Sep 12

A Survey of Threats Against Voice Authentication and Anti-Spoofing Systems

The paper reviews how voice authentication has evolved from handcrafted acoustic features to deep learning speaker embeddings, expanding its use in finance, smart devices, and law enforcement. It surveys modern threats—including data poisoning, adversarial, deepfake, and adversarial spoofing attacks—tracing their development alongside technological advances. For each attack type, the authors summarize methods, datasets, performance, and limitations, and organize the literature using accepted taxonomies to highlight emerging risks and open challenges.

By Kamel Kamel, Keshav Sood, Hridoy Sankar Dutta, Sunil Aryal