Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech Foundation Models
<|reference_start|>Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech Foundation Models: Recent developments in large speech foundation models like Whisper have led to their widespread use in many automatic speech recognition (ASR) applications. These systems incorporate `special tokens' in their vocabulary, such as $\texttt{<|endoftext|>}$, to guide their language generation process. However, we demonstrate that these tokens can be exploited by adversarial attacks to manipulate the model's behavior. We propose a simple yet effective method to learn a universal acoustic realization of Whisper's $\texttt{<|endoftext|>}$ token, which, when prepended to any speech signal, encourages the model to ignore the speech and only transcribe the special token, effectively `muting' the model. Our experiments demonstrate that the same, universal 0.64-second adversarial audio segment can successfully mute a target Whisper ASR model for over 97\% of speech samples. Moreover, we find that this universal adversarial audio segment often transfers to new datasets and tasks. Overall this work demonstrates the vulnerability of Whisper models to `muting' adversarial attacks, where such attacks can pose both risks and potential benefits in real-world settings: for example the attack can be used to bypass speech moderation systems, or conversely the attack can also be used to protect private speech data.<|reference_end|>
@article{raina2024muting,
    title={Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech
  Foundation Models},
    author={Vyas Raina, Rao Ma, Charles McGhee, Kate Knill, Mark Gales},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.06134},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2405.06134},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.SD eess.AS}
}