DeepSick: Deceiving Voice-Based Diagnostic Models with Synthetic Multilingual Pathological Speech Signals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Voice-based diagnostic systems offer a scalable solution for remote health assessment. However, recent advances in generative voice models may enable malicious manipulation of voice samples to simulate or conceal disease-related speech characteristics, which poses new risks to diagnostic systems. This paper investigates the vulnerability of diagnostic and detection models to such types of "deepfake" attacks. We show that it is possible to train a generative model to convert between healthy voices and pathological ones, which in turn, can successfully deceive existing diagnostic systems. Here, focus is placed on COVID-19 infection and respiratory abnormalities, but the method can be applied across different pathological conditions affecting vocal attributes. We also benchmark four state-of-the-art synthesized voice detection models on both real and generated pathological speech from three datasets. Our results show that current synthetic voice detectors, typically trained on healthy speech data, perform poorly on generated pathological samples. While fine-tuning with real pathological voices improves detection, a substantial performance gap remains. This work provides initial insights on an emerging threat to remote voice diagnostic systems that needs further work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".