Task-Aware Joint Pruning and Distillation for Efficient Audio Deepfake Detection

Advances in speech synthesis have made deepfake speeches increasingly convincing, posing growing threats to security. While self-supervised learning (SSL) based detectors achieve state-of-the-art performance, their computational demands (typically 300M+ parameters) prevent deployment on resource-constrained devices. Existing compression methods, designed mainly for content-centric tasks, struggle to maintain competitive performance when directly adapted to deepfake detection. We propose a Task-Aware Joint Pruning and Distillation framework that combines cross-domain knowledge distillation with movement-guided structured pruning to transfer forgery-discriminative knowledge and preserve critical structures under aggressive compression. Our framework reduces the model to 31.9M parameters with 6.3× FLOPs reduction, with an average performance drop of only 1.30% across multiple datasets compared to the uncompressed baseline, demonstrating strong potential for on-device deployment.