Hear No Evil: Towards Adversarial Robustness of Automatic Speech Recognition via Multi-Task Learning

As automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are now being widely deployed in the wild, the increasing threat of adversarial attacks raises serious questions about the security and reliability of using such systems. On the other hand, multi-task learning (MTL) has shown success in training models that can resist adversarial attacks in the computer vision domain. In this work, we investigate the impact of performing such multi-task learning on the adversarial robustness of ASR models in the speech domain. We conduct extensive MTL experimentation by combining semantically diverse tasks such as accent classification and ASR, and evaluate a wide range of adversarial settings. Our thorough analysis reveals that performing MTL with semantically diverse tasks consistently makes it harder for an adversarial attack to succeed. We also discuss in detail the serious pitfalls and their related remedies that have a significant impact on the robustness of MTL models. Our proposed MTL approach shows considerable absolute improvements in adversarially targeted WER ranging from 17.25 up to 59.90 compared to single-task learning baselines (attention decoder and CTC respectively). Ours is the first in-depth study that uncovers adversarial robustness gains from multi-task learning for ASR.