Clustering Unsupervised Representations as Defense Against Poisoning Attacks on Speech Commands Classification System

Thomas Thebaud, Sonal Joshi, Henry Li, Martin Sustek, Jesús Villalba, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Najim Dehak

Abstract: Poisoning attacks entail attackers intentionally tampering with training data. In this paper, we consider a dirty-label poisoning attack scenario on a speech commands classification system. The threat model assumes that certain utterances from one of the classes (source class) are poisoned by superimposing a trigger on it, and its label is changed to another class selected by the attacker (target class). We propose a filtering defense against such an attack. First, we use DIstillation with NO labels (DINO) to learn unsupervised representations for all the training examples. Next, we use K-means and LDA to cluster these representations. Finally, we keep the utterances with the most repeated label in their cluster for training and discard the rest. For a 10% poisoned source class, we demonstrate a drop in attack success rate from 99.75% to 0.25%. We test our defense against a variety of threat models, including different target and source classes, as well as trigger variations.