arXiv AI

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.

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 Computation and Language
Aug 24

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.

By Tianle Yang, Cuiling Zhang, Chengzhe Sun, Siwei Lyu, Phil Rose
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
Sep 4

VoxPrivacy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Interactional Privacy of Speech Language Models

The paper introduces VoxPrivacy, a benchmark for assessing interactional privacy in Speech Language Models (SLMs). It evaluates models on a 32‑hour bilingual dataset across three difficulty tiers, revealing that most open‑source SLMs perform near random on conditional privacy decisions and even strong closed‑source systems struggle with proactive privacy inference. The authors also validate these findings on a real‑speech subset and show that fine‑tuning on a 4,000‑hour training set can improve privacy‑preserving capabilities while maintaining robustness.

By Yuxiang Wang, Hongyu Liu, Dekun Chen, Xueyao Zhang, Zhizheng Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Your Voice Cloning System is Secretly a Voice Anonymizer

The paper demonstrates that the multilingual voice cloning model XTTSv2 can be repurposed for speaker anonymization without retraining. By conditioning on a pseudo-speaker and using an iterative refinement strategy, the authors balance privacy and intelligibility, achieving near‑optimal privacy (EER ≈ 0.49) and competitive speech quality across seven European languages. The method outperforms dedicated anonymization baselines and requires no language‑specific training.

By Romolo Muletta, Felix Matthias Saaro, Mark Cieliebak, Jan Deriu