A Data-Centric Framework for Addressing Phonetic and Prosodic Challenges in Russian Speech Generative Models

Russian speech synthesis presents distinctive challenges, including vowel reduction, consonant devoicing, variable stress patterns, homograph ambiguity, and unnatural intonation. This paper introduces Balalaika, a novel dataset comprising more than 2,000 hours of studio-quality Russian speech with comprehensive textual annotations, including punctuation and stress markings. Experimental results show that models trained on Balalaika significantly outperform those trained on existing datasets in both speech synthesis and enhancement tasks. We detail the dataset construction pipeline, annotation methodology, and results of comparative evaluations.

AASIST3: KAN-Enhanced AASIST Speech Deepfake Detection using SSL Features and Additional Regularization for the ASVspoof 2024 Challenge

Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems, which identify speakers based on their voice characteristics, have numerous applications, such as user authentication in financial transactions, exclusive access control in smart devices, and forensic fraud detection. However, the advancement of deep learning algorithms has enabled the generation of synthetic audio through Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Voice Conversion (VC) systems, exposing ASV systems to potential vulnerabilities. To counteract this, we propose a novel architecture named AASIST3. By enhancing the existing AASIST framework with Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, additional layers, encoders, and pre-emphasis techniques, AASIST3 achieves a more than twofold improvement in performance. It demonstrates minDCF results of 0.5357 in the closed condition and 0.1414 in the open condition, significantly enhancing the detection of synthetic voices and improving ASV security.