From Sound Representation to Model Robustness

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the impact of different standard environmental sound representations (spectrograms) on the recognition performance and adversarial attack robustness of a victim residual convolutional neural network. Averaged over various experiments on three benchmarking environmental sound datasets, we found the ResNet-18 model outperforms other deep learning architectures such as GoogLeNet and AlexNet both in terms of classification accuracy and the number of training parameters. Therefore we set this model as our front-end classifier for subsequent investigations. Herein, we measure the impact of different settings required for generating more informative mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), short-time Fourier transform (STFT), and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) representations on our front-end model. This measurement involves comparing the classification performance over the adversarial robustness. On the balance of average budgets allocated by adversary and the cost of attack, we demonstrate an inverse relationship between recognition accuracy and model robustness against six attack algorithms. Moreover, our experimental results show that while the ResNet-18 model trained on DWT spectrograms achieves the highest recognition accuracy, attacking this model is relatively more costly for the adversary compared to other 2D representations.