# SEAM: Shortcut-Aware Real-Time Detection of Scripted vs. Spontaneous Speech for Interview Guardrails

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06837 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06837/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Safety alignment, refusal and guardrails, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 16 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Safety alignment, refusal and guardrails](https://mlsanity.com/safety/safety-alignment-refusal-and-guardrails/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [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)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04624/) (2021)
- [DistilHuBERT: Speech Representation Learning by Layer-wise Distillation of Hidden-unit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01900/) (2021)
- [The People's Speech: A Large-Scale Diverse English Speech Recognition Dataset for Commercial Usage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09344/) (2021)
- [HEAR: Holistic Evaluation of Audio Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03022/) (2022)
- [A Differentiable Perceptual Audio Metric Learned from Just Noticeable Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04460/) (2020)
- [Filler Word Detection and Classification: A Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15135/) (2022)
- [How to Construct Perfect and Worse-than-Coin-Flip Spoofing Countermeasures: A Word of Warning on Shortcut Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00044/) (2023)
- [Content-based Representations of audio using Siamese neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10974/) (2017)
- [Classification of Spontaneous and Scripted Speech for Multilingual Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11896/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Quieter Than the Room: Representation Drift and Task Robustness in Speech Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27195/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scripted vs spontaneous speech detection is appealing for interview guardrails, but benchmark performance can be inflated by shortcuts tied to corpus identity, channel conditions, and recording artifacts rather than speaking style itself. We present SEAM, a shortcut-aware framework for real-time scriptedness detection that combines uniform preprocessing, seam-aware sampling, non-speech augmentation, and a compact DistilHuBERT backbone. With 8s windows, the model achieves 0.971 +- 0.004 ROC-AUC on an external interview-domain evaluation set. Removing the shortcut-prevention components improves internal held-out metrics but sharply reduces external performance, indicating shortcut learning. Post-training quantization reduces the model footprint to 41.8MB with little loss in external performance. The results demonstrate that robust real-time scriptedness detection depends not only on the backbone, but on shortcut-aware data design and evaluation. We release code and model checkpoints.