Zijie Zhou
Author directory2026
TTS-Guard: Black-Box Ownership Verification of Text-to-Speech Models via Adaptive Adversarial Speaker-Pair Fingerprints
Xubin Yue | Zhenhua Xu | Zhebo Wang | Mengting Li | Zijie Zhou | Wenpeng Xing | Dezhang Kong | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xubin Yue | Zhenhua Xu | Zhebo Wang | Mengting Li | Zijie Zhou | Wenpeng Xing | Dezhang Kong | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
The rapid maturation of zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) models has turned high-quality voice cloning into a widely available capability, raising acute concerns over unauthorised replication, fine-tuning and resale of proprietary speech models. Yet ownership verification for TTS remains largely open: speech is a continuous waveform whose perturbations are easily destroyed by routine signal processing, and the human auditory system imposes a much tighter perceptual budget than vision. We present TTS-Guard, a black-box ownership verification framework for TTS models built on adversarial speaker-pair fingerprints. TTS-Guard(i) selects key speaker pairs in a dual embedding space for architecture-agnostic stealth;(ii) optimises a perturbation through an adaptive curriculum of shadow models covering fine-tuning, pruning, quantisation and distillation; and (iii) aggregates black-box queries into a calibrated Verification Confidence Score. On five mainstream TTS systems, TTS-Guard reaches an average Fingerprint Success Rate of 96.4% at a False Positive Rate of 5.8%, while preserving intelligibility and naturalness. The fingerprint remains effective against ten audio attacks, six model modifications, and two state-of-the-art adversarial purifiers.