@inproceedings{moradiBenchmarkingFoundationModels2026,

title = {Benchmarking Foundation Models for Cross-Domain Speaker Profiling},

author = {A. Moradi and T. H. Falk},

url = {https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105042046048?origin=resultslist},

doi = {10.1109/CAI68641.2026.11536565},

isbn = {979-833156039-3 (ISBN)},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-01-01},

booktitle = {IEEE Conf. Artif. Intell., CAI},

pages = {78–84},

publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.},

abstract = {Speech conveys both linguistic and paralinguistic content. While pre-trained speech foundation models have been widely explored for linguistic tasks, such as speech recognition, and for speaker identification and verification tasks, very limited work has been done to test their usefulness for multi-attribute speaker profiling, i.e., simultaneous prediction of biological sex, age, and height from speech. In this paper, we aim to benchmark the performance of four state-of-the-art self-supervised foundation models, namely, WavLM, Wav2vec2, HuBERT, and XLSR-53, under both within- and cross-domain conditions. Each model is employed as a frozen pre-trained feature extractor, with lightweight task-specific heads trained jointly in a multi-task learning framework, and their feature extraction latency is empirically analyzed to assess practical deployment considerations. Experiments on two datasets show that WavLM achieves consistently strong within- and cross-domain performance for biological sex prediction, while Wav2vec2 and XLSR-53 exhibit more consistent performance for the age and height regression tasks in cross-domain settings. Interpretability analysis based on correlations with key acoustic features show (1) WavLM internal representations correlating highly with pitch and formant frequencies, corroborating the improved performance on biological sex prediction, and (2) XLSR-53 correlating highly with the second formant frequency, corroborating the results obtained for age and height. Overall, our analysis shows that pre-trained speech foundation models could serve as useful tools for cross-domain speaker profiling tasks. While no model stood out as a clear winner across all tested physical traits, future work could explore the use of ensemble methods for improved generalizability. © 2026 IEEE.},

note = {Journal Abbreviation: IEEE Conf. Artif. Intell., CAI},

keywords = {Benchmarking, Continuous speech recognition, Cross-domain, Forecasting, Formant frequency, Foundation models, Learning systems, Linguistics, Multi-attributes, Multi-task learning, Paralinguistic, Performance, Speaker identification, Speaker verification, Speech communication, State of the art, Verification task},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{temmarPhoneticAnalysisReal2025,

title = {Phonetic Analysis of Real and Synthetic Speech Using HuBERT Embeddings: Perspectives for Deepfake Detection},

author = {D. E. Temmar and A. Hamadene and V. Nallaguntla and A. Fursule and M. S. Allili and S. Kshirsagar and A. R. Avila},

url = {https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105033145913?origin=resultslist},

doi = {10.1109/SMC58881.2025.11343334},

isbn = {1062922X (ISSN); 979-833153358-8 (ISBN)},

year  = {2025},

date = {2025-01-01},

booktitle = {Conf. Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Syst. Man Cybern.},

pages = {86–91},

publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.},

abstract = {The growing sophistication of speech generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced new challenges in audio deepfake detection. Text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) technologies can now produce convincing synthetic speech with high quality and intelligibility. This poses a serious threat to voice biometric security systems, such as automatic speaker recognition. It also increases the risks associated to the spread of spoken disinformation, where synthetic voices can be used to disseminate malicious content. In this study, we conduct an analysis of real and synthetic speech at phonetic and word levels. For that, a parallel dataset comprising real and synthetic speech signals were developed based on a subset of the LibriSpeech ASR corpus. Synthetic speech samples were generated using two TTS and one VC systems: Coqui TTS, VITS TTS, and StarGANv2 VC. We adopted HuBERT, a self-supervised speech model, to extract speech embeddings. The motivation for using this model stems from its ability to recognize sound units corresponding to the so-called pseudo phonemes. Our analysis is based on the KL divergence (KLD) between the distributions of synthetic and real phonemes, which allowed us to rank synthetic phonemes based on their alignment with their real counterpart. We also trained several classifiers per phoneme to distinguish between real and synthetic samples. We then compute the correlations between KLD and accuracies per phoneme. Besides showing a list of phonemes that are more discriminative, our findings suggest that vowels correlate better with the classifiers' performance, suggesting that the KLD can be an indicator of the most distinguishable phonemes for deepfake detection. © 2025 IEEE.},

note = {Journal Abbreviation: Conf. Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Syst. Man Cybern.},

keywords = {Artificial intelligence, Audio acoustics, Audio DeepFake Detection, Audio signal processing, Embeddings, Hu-BERT, KL-divergence, Linguistics, Phoneme and word Embedding, Phonetic analysis, Security systems, Self-Supervised Speech Representation, Speech analysis, Speech communication, Speech processing, Speech synthesis, Synthetic speech, Text to speech, Voice conversion},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}