# The Impact of Audio Watermarking on Audio Anti-Spoofing Countermeasures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20736 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20736/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [AASIST: Audio Anti-Spoofing using Integrated Spectro-Temporal Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01200/) (2021)
- [ASVspoof 2021: accelerating progress in spoofed and deepfake speech detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00537/) (2021)
- [Does Audio Deepfake Detection Generalize?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16263/) (2022)
- [Proactive Detection of Voice Cloning with Localized Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17264/) (2024)
- [RawBoost: A Raw Data Boosting and Augmentation Method applied to Automatic Speaker Verification Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04433/) (2021)
- [WavMark: Watermarking for Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12770/) (2023)
- [Detecting Voice Cloning Attacks via Timbre Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03410/) (2023)
- [SilentCipher: Deep Audio Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03822/) (2024)
- [Nes2Net: A Lightweight Nested Architecture for Foundation Model Driven Speech Anti-spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05657/) (2025)
- [TIMIT-TTS: a Text-to-Speech Dataset for Multimodal Synthetic Media Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08000/) (2022)
- [Practical Attacks on Voice Spoofing Countermeasures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14642/) (2021)
- [An Improved Phase Coding Audio Steganography Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13277/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Watermark Shortcut: How Provenance Marking Sabotages Audio Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23335/) (2026)
- [PC-Mix: Partial-Component Audio Spoofing Detection under Mixed Speech and Environmental Sound Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10345/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents the first study on the impact of audio watermarking on spoofing countermeasures. While anti-spoofing systems are essential for securing speech-based applications, the influence of widely used audio watermarking, originally designed for copyright protection, remains largely unexplored. We construct watermark-augmented training and evaluation datasets, named the Watermark-Spoofing dataset, by applying diverse handcrafted and neural watermarking methods to existing anti-spoofing datasets. Experiments show that watermarking consistently degrades anti-spoofing performance, with higher watermark density correlating with higher Equal Error Rates (EERs). To mitigate this, we propose the Knowledge-Preserving Watermark Learning (KPWL) framework, enabling models to adapt to watermark-induced shifts while preserving their original-domain spoofing detection capability. These findings reveal audio watermarking as a previously overlooked domain shift and establish the first benchmark for developing watermark-resilient anti-spoofing systems. All related protocols are publicly available at https://github.com/Alphawarheads/Watermark_Spoofing.git