Quantum Kernels for Audio Deepfake Detection Using Spectrogram Patch Features

arXiv:2605.06035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum machine learning has emerged as a promising tool for pattern recognition, yet many audio-focused approaches still treat spectrograms as generic images and do not explicitly exploit their time-frequency structure. We propose Q-Patch, a quantum feature map tailored to audio that encodes local time-frequency patches from mel-spectrograms into quantum states using shallow, hardware-efficient circuits with adjacency-aware entanglement. Each se