# What Does an Audio Deepfake Detector Focus on? A Study in the Time Domain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13887 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13887/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [Generic Attention-model Explainability for Interpreting Bi-Modal and Encoder-Decoder Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15679/) (2021)
- [The Disagreement Problem in Explainable Machine Learning: A Practitioner's Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01602/) (2022)
- [Does Audio Deepfake Detection Generalize?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16263/) (2022)
- [Ground Truth Evaluation of Neural Network Explanations with CLEVR-XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07258/) (2020)
- [Automatic speaker verification spoofing and deepfake detection using wav2vec 2.0 and data augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12233/) (2022)
- [The PartialSpoof Database and Countermeasures for the Detection of Short Fake Speech Segments Embedded in an Utterance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05177/) (2022)
- [Speech is Silver, Silence is Golden: What do ASVspoof-trained Models Really Learn?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12914/) (2021)
- [The Vicomtech Audio Deepfake Detection System based on Wav2Vec2 for the 2022 ADD Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01573/) (2022)
- [Opti-CAM: Optimizing saliency maps for interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07002/) (2023)
- [Can large-scale vocoded spoofed data improve speech spoofing countermeasure with a self-supervised front end?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06014/) (2023)
- [Explaining deep learning models for spoofing and deepfake detection with SHapley Additive exPlanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03309/) (2021)
- [One-Class Knowledge Distillation for Spoofing Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08285/) (2023)
- [The Impact of Silence on Speech Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11827/) (2023)
- [How Do Neural Spoofing Countermeasures Detect Partially Spoofed Audio?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02483/) (2024)
- [Posthoc Interpretation via Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12659/) (2023)
- [Explainable deepfake and spoofing detection: an attack analysis using SHapley Additive exPlanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13693/) (2022)
- [Interpretable Temporal Class Activation Representation for Audio Spoofing Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08825/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SHIELD: A Secure and Highly Enhanced Integrated Learning for Robust Deepfake Detection against Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13170/) (2025)
- [A Data-Driven Diffusion-based Approach for Audio Deepfake Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03425/) (2025)
- [Explainable-by-Design Audio Deepfake Detection via Wiener-Hopf Linear Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12584/) (2026)
- [Unraveling the Real Working Mechanism and Inherent Flaws of GAE: A Method for Interpreting Transformer Processes from an Economic Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07213/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adding explanations to audio deepfake detection (ADD) models will boost their real-world application by providing insight on the decision making process. In this paper, we propose a relevancy-based explainable AI (XAI) method to analyze the predictions of transformer-based ADD models. We compare against standard Grad-CAM and SHAP-based methods, using quantitative faithfulness metrics as well as a partial spoof test, to comprehensively analyze the relative importance of different temporal regions in an audio. We consider large datasets, unlike previous works where only limited utterances are studied, and find that the XAI methods differ in their explanations. The proposed relevancy-based XAI method performs the best overall on a variety of metrics. Further investigation on the relative importance of speech/non-speech, phonetic content, and voice onsets/offsets suggest that the XAI results obtained from analyzing limited utterances don't necessarily hold when evaluated on large datasets.