Meng Haoyang, Wang Kang, Huang Chenqi, Tang Yunqi, Wang Danlin, Deng Yuyang
Accepted: 2026-09-01
In response to the security threats posed by deepfake speech technology to identity authentication, media credibility, and forensic evidence, this paper presents a systematic survey of deepfake speech detection driven by Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) speech representations from 2020 to 2026. First, this paper provides a broad overview of deepfake speech generation techniques and detection tasks, clarifying the key characteristics of the deepfake speech detection problem. Second, it analyzes the pre-training mechanisms and layer-wise representation distribution patterns of representative SSL backbones, including wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT, WavLM, and XLS-R. Then, existing methods are summarized from multiple perspectives, including structural back-end modeling, layer-wise and multi-source feature fusion, open-set learning objectives, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), post-training, lightweight deployment, datasets, and evaluation protocols. Existing studies suggest that different SSL layers may provide complementary characterizations of vocoder artifacts, prosodic abnormalities, and speaker-attribute shifts, and that, in most reported settings, appropriate layer-wise fusion and low-cost adaptation can help improve cross-domain robustness. Finally, this paper summarizes key challenges, including large-model-driven emerging attacks, cross-lingual generalization, adversarial robustness, lightweight real-time deployment, explainability, and compliance, and suggests that continual learning, multimodal verification, and forgery-oriented specialized pre-training may be directions worth further attention.