Papers › Detecting and Defending Against Adversarial Attacks on Automatic Speech Recognition...

Detecting and Defending Against Adversarial Attacks on Automatic Speech Recognition via Diffusion Models

12 Sep 2024arXiv:2409.07936archive 2025-07-28

Nikolai L. Kühne, Astrid H. F. Kitchen, Marie S. Jensen, Mikkel S. L. Brøndt, Martin Gonzalez, Christophe Biscio, Zheng-Hua Tan

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This paper addresses detection and defence against targeted white-box attacks on speech signals for ASR systems. While existing work has utilised diffusion models (DMs) to purify adversarial examples, achieving state-of-the-art results in keyword spotting tasks, their effectiveness for more complex tasks such as sentence-level ASR remains unexplored. Additionally, the impact of the number of forward diffusion steps on performance is not well understood. In this paper, we systematically investigate the use of DMs for defending against adversarial attacks on sentences and examine the effect of varying forward diffusion steps. Through comprehensive experiments on the Mozilla Common Voice dataset, we demonstrate that two forward diffusion steps can completely defend against adversarial attacks on sentences. Moreover, we introduce a novel, training-free approach for detecting adversarial attacks by leveraging a pre-trained DM. Our experimental results show that this method can detect adversarial attacks with high accuracy.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Adversarial AttackAdversarial PurificationAutomatic Speech RecognitionSpeech Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Diffusion

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections