PhiNet: Speaker Verification with Phonetic Interpretability

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ma, Yi, Wang, Shuai, Liu, Tianchi, Li, Haizhou
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ma, Yi
Wang, Shuai
Liu, Tianchi
Li, Haizhou
author_facet Ma, Yi
Wang, Shuai
Liu, Tianchi
Li, Haizhou
contents Despite remarkable progress, automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems typically lack the transparency required for high-accountability applications. Motivated by how human experts perform forensic speaker comparison (FSC), we propose a speaker verification network with phonetic interpretability, PhiNet, designed to enhance both local and global interpretability by leveraging phonetic evidence in decision-making. For users, PhiNet provides detailed phonetic-level comparisons that enable manual inspection of speaker-specific features and facilitate a more critical evaluation of verification outcomes. For developers, it offers explicit reasoning behind verification decisions, simplifying error tracing and informing hyperparameter selection. In our experiments, we demonstrate PhiNet's interpretability with practical examples, including its application in analyzing the impact of different hyperparameters. We conduct both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the proposed interpretability methods and assess speaker verification performance across multiple benchmark datasets, including VoxCeleb, SITW, and LibriSpeech. Results show that PhiNet achieves performance comparable to traditional black-box ASV models while offering meaningful, interpretable explanations for its decisions, bridging the gap between ASV and forensic analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01590
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PhiNet: Speaker Verification with Phonetic Interpretability
Ma, Yi
Wang, Shuai
Liu, Tianchi
Li, Haizhou
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
Despite remarkable progress, automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems typically lack the transparency required for high-accountability applications. Motivated by how human experts perform forensic speaker comparison (FSC), we propose a speaker verification network with phonetic interpretability, PhiNet, designed to enhance both local and global interpretability by leveraging phonetic evidence in decision-making. For users, PhiNet provides detailed phonetic-level comparisons that enable manual inspection of speaker-specific features and facilitate a more critical evaluation of verification outcomes. For developers, it offers explicit reasoning behind verification decisions, simplifying error tracing and informing hyperparameter selection. In our experiments, we demonstrate PhiNet's interpretability with practical examples, including its application in analyzing the impact of different hyperparameters. We conduct both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the proposed interpretability methods and assess speaker verification performance across multiple benchmark datasets, including VoxCeleb, SITW, and LibriSpeech. Results show that PhiNet achieves performance comparable to traditional black-box ASV models while offering meaningful, interpretable explanations for its decisions, bridging the gap between ASV and forensic analysis.
title PhiNet: Speaker Verification with Phonetic Interpretability
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01590