The Content Leash: Mitigating Degenerate Solutions in Invertible Speaker Anonymization

Abstract

Voice anonymization aims to protect a speaker's identity while preserving the linguistic content of speech, enabling voice data to be shared and processed with reduced privacy risk. This work focuses on reversible voice anonymization, where the original voice can be recovered by an authorized user rather than being permanently discarded. However, existing approaches can achieve apparent speaker anonymization by degrading the speech itself, while their effectiveness may also depend on the speaker-verification representation used during training. This creates a need for methods that protect speaker identity without sacrificing speech intelligibility and that remain effective against unseen speaker verifiers. We introduce content preserving training constraints to improve the privacy-utility trade-off by preventing anonymization from being achieved primarily through speech degradation. We further introduce a verifier-generalization strategy that incorporates a stronger speaker-verification representation during training, improving anonymization robustness beyond the verifier used in the original training setup. The resulting approach maintains intelligible speech, strengthens anonymization, and preserves reliable voice restoration, with evaluation on unseen speakers and held-out speaker verification models. On 38 unseen speakers, the approach raises the attacker's equal error rate from a measured floor of 2.8% to 26.3%, and to 27.9% against a held-out verifier, with 11.8% word error rate and 94.9% speaker similarity on key-based restoration. These improvements advance reversible voice anonymization toward practical privacy-preserving speech applications, where anonymized speech can be safely processed or shared while the original voice remains recoverable under authorized conditions.