Investigating the Robustness of End-to-End Speech Recognition Systems Against Adversarial Audio Perturbations in Noisy Environments
Keywords:
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), adversarial audio attacks, noise robustness, deep learning, end-to-end speech systems, environmental noise, Carlini & Wagner attackAbstract
End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have significantly advanced through the adoption of deep learning architectures such as Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC), sequence-to-sequence models, and Transformer-based approaches. However, these systems remain susceptible to adversarial audio perturbations—imperceptible modifications that can mislead recognition models. This study investigates the robustness of state-of-the-art ASR systems under adversarial conditions, particularly when exposed to additive environmental noise. Using attacks such as Carlini & Wagner (C&W) and Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), we evaluate performance degradation across various noise levels. Our findings reveal that environmental noise both exacerbates and, paradoxically, sometimes mitigates the impact of adversarial perturbations. The results underscore the need for more resilient ASR architectures and training methodologies in adversarial and noisy settings.
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Copyright (c) 2021 Ingrid Svensson (Author)

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