Effective and Inconspicuous Over-the-Air Adversarial Examples with Adaptive Filtering

Patrick O'Reilly, Pranjal Awasthi, Aravindan Vijayaraghavan, Bryan Pardo

Abstract: While deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance on many audio classification tasks, they are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples - artificially-generated perturbations of natural instances that cause a network to make incorrect predictions. In this work we demonstrate a novel audio-domain adversarial attack that modifies benign audio using an interpretable and differentiable parametric transformation - adaptive filtering. Unlike existing state-of-the-art attacks, our proposed method does not require a complex optimization procedure or generative model, relying only on a simple variant of gradient descent to tune filter parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by performing over-the-air attacks against a state-of-the-art speaker verification model and show that our attack is less conspicuous than an existing state-of-the-art attack while matching its effectiveness. Our results demonstrate the potential of transformations beyond direct waveform addition for concealing high-magnitude adversarial perturbations, allowing adversaries to attack more effectively in challenging, real-world settings.