# BEAT2AASIST model with layer fusion for ESDD 2026 Challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15180/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [BEATs: Audio Pre-Training with Acoustic Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09058/) (2022)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [AASIST: Audio Anti-Spoofing using Integrated Spectro-Temporal Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01200/) (2021)
- [UnivNet: A Neural Vocoder with Multi-Resolution Spectrogram Discriminators for High-Fidelity Waveform Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07889/) (2021)
- [ADD 2023: the Second Audio Deepfake Detection Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13774/) (2023)
- [EAT: Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Efficient Audio Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03497/) (2024)
- [A Large-Scale Evaluation of Speech Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09385/) (2024)
- [ASVspoof 5: Design, Collection and Validation of Resources for Spoofing, Deepfake, and Adversarial Attack Detection Using Crowdsourced Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08857/) (2025)
- [Spoofed training data for speech spoofing countermeasure can be efficiently created using neural vocoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10570/) (2022)
- [Can large-scale vocoded spoofed data improve speech spoofing countermeasure with a self-supervised front end?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06014/) (2023)
- [EnvSDD: Benchmarking Environmental Sound Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19203/) (2025)
- [HM-Conformer: A Conformer-based audio deepfake detection system with hierarchical pooling and multi-level classification token aggregation methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08208/) (2023)
- [ESDD 2026: Environmental Sound Deepfake Detection Challenge Evaluation Plan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04529/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in audio generation have increased the risk of realistic environmental sound manipulation, motivating the ESDD 2026 Challenge as the first large-scale benchmark for Environmental Sound Deepfake Detection (ESDD). We propose BEAT2AASIST which extends BEATs-AASIST by splitting BEATs-derived representations along frequency or channel dimension and processing them with dual AASIST branches. To enrich feature representations, we incorporate top-k transformer layer fusion using concatenation, CNN-gated, and SE-gated strategies. In addition, vocoder-based data augmentation is applied to improve robustness against unseen spoofing methods. Experimental results on the official test sets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance across the challenge tracks.