Is Broader Better? A Controlled Study of Multilingual Coverage and Pretraining Objective in Frozen SSL Encoders for Speech Deepfake Detection
Frozen self-supervised (SSL) speech encoders are strong, low-cost front ends for audio deepfake detection, and recent comparisons agree that large, multilingual, discriminative encoders generalize best out of domain. These comparisons fail to control for encoder capacity, pretraining objective, and multilingual coverag...