We demonstrate the existence of universal adversarial perturbations, which can fool a family of audio classification architectures, for both targeted and untargeted attack scenarios. We propose two methods for finding such perturbations. The first method is based on an iterative, greedy approach that is well-known in computer vision: it aggregates small perturbations to the input so as to push it to the decision boundary. The second method, which is the main contribution of this work, is a novel penalty formulation, which finds targeted and untargeted universal adversarial perturbations. Differently from the greedy approach, the penalty method minimizes an appropriate objective function on a batch of samples. Therefore, it produces more successful attacks when the number of training samples is limited. Moreover, we provide a proof that the proposed penalty method theoretically converges to a solution that corresponds to universal adversarial perturbations. We also demonstrate that it is possible to provide successful attacks using the penalty method when only one sample from the target dataset is available for the attacker. Experimental results on attacking various 1D CNN architectures have shown attack success rates higher than 85.0% and 83.1% for targeted and untargeted attacks, respectively using the proposed penalty method.
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；The University of Tennessee, Knoxville（田纳西大学诺克斯维尔分校）
Recently, the vulnerability of DNN-based audio systems to adversarial attacks has obtained the increasing attention. However, the existing audio adversarial attacks allow the adversary to possess the entire user's audio input as well as granting sufficient time budget to generate the adversarial perturbations. These idealized assumptions, however, makes the existing audio adversarial attacks mostly impossible to be launched in a timely fashion in practice (e.g., playing unnoticeable adversarial perturbations along with user's streaming input). To overcome these limitations, in this paper we pr…
Audio processing models based on deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks even when the adversarial audio waveform is 99.9% similar to a benign sample. Given the wide application of DNN-based audio recognition systems, detecting the presence of adversarial examples is of high practical relevance. By applying anomalous pattern detection techniques in the activation space of these models, we show that 2 of the recent and current state-of-the-art adversarial attacks on audio processing systems systematically lead to higher-than-expected activation at some subset of nodes and we…
Efficient audio synthesis is an inherently difficult machine learning task, as human perception is sensitive to both global structure and fine-scale waveform coherence. Autoregressive models, such as WaveNet, model local structure at the expense of global latent structure and slow iterative sampling, while Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have global latent conditioning and efficient parallel sampling, but struggle to generate locally-coherent audio waveforms. Herein, we demonstrate that GANs can in fact generate high-fidelity and locally-coherent audio by modeling log magnitudes and in…
Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences（奥地利科学院声学研究所）；Swiss Data Science Center, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院瑞士数据科学中心）
Time-frequency (TF) representations provide powerful and intuitive features for the analysis of time series such as audio. But still, generative modeling of audio in the TF domain is a subtle matter. Consequently, neural audio synthesis widely relies on directly modeling the waveform and previous attempts at unconditionally synthesizing audio from neurally generated invertible TF features still struggle to produce audio at satisfying quality. In this article, focusing on the short-time Fourier transform, we discuss the challenges that arise in audio synthesis based on generated invertible TF f…
University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
We propose a method to generate audio adversarial examples that can attack a state-of-the-art speech recognition model in the physical world. Previous work assumes that generated adversarial examples are directly fed to the recognition model, and is not able to perform such a physical attack because of reverberation and noise from playback environments. In contrast, our method obtains robust adversarial examples by simulating transformations caused by playback or recording in the physical world and incorporating the transformations into the generation process. Evaluation and a listening experi…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
We propose using a computational model of the auditory cortex as a defense against adversarial attacks on audio. We apply several white-box iterative optimization-based adversarial attacks to an implementation of Amazon Alexa's HW network, and a modified version of this network with an integrated cortical representation, and show that the cortical features help defend against universal adversarial examples. At the same level of distortion, the adversarial noises found for the cortical network are always less effective for universal audio attacks. We make our code publicly available at https://…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；École de Technologie Superiéure, Université du Québec（魁北克大学高等技术学院）；Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná（巴拉那天主教大学）
This paper shows the susceptibility of spectrogram-based audio classifiers to adversarial attacks and the transferability of such attacks to audio waveforms. Some commonly used adversarial attacks to images have been applied to Mel-frequency and short-time Fourier transform spectrograms, and such perturbed spectrograms are able to fool a 2D convolutional neural network (CNN). Such attacks produce perturbed spectrograms that are visually imperceptible by humans. Furthermore, the audio waveforms reconstructed from the perturbed spectrograms are also able to fool a 1D CNN trained on the original …
The application of deep recurrent networks to audio transcription has led to impressive gains in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Many have demonstrated that small adversarial perturbations can fool deep neural networks into incorrectly predicting a specified target with high confidence. Current work on fooling ASR systems have focused on white-box attacks, in which the model architecture and parameters are known. In this paper, we adopt a black-box approach to adversarial generation, combining the approaches of both genetic algorithms and gradient estimation to solve the task. We a…
Faculty of Informatics（信息学院）；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学）
Human-machine interaction is increasingly dependent on speech communication. Machine Learning models are usually applied to interpret human speech commands. However, these models can be fooled by adversarial examples, which are inputs intentionally perturbed to produce a wrong prediction without being noticed. While much research has been focused on developing new techniques to generate adversarial perturbations, less attention has been given to aspects that determine whether and how the perturbations are noticed by humans. This question is relevant since high fooling rates of proposed adversa…
In this paper, we investigate the potential effect of the adversarially training on the robustness of six advanced deep neural networks against a variety of targeted and non-targeted adversarial attacks. We firstly show that, the ResNet-56 model trained on the 2D representation of the discrete wavelet transform appended with the tonnetz chromagram outperforms other models in terms of recognition accuracy. Then we demonstrate the positive impact of adversarially training on this model as well as other deep architectures against six types of attack algorithms (white and black-box) with the cost …
There has been a recent surge in adversarial attacks on deep learning based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. These attacks pose new challenges to deep learning security and have raised significant concerns in deploying ASR systems in safety-critical applications. In this work, we introduce WaveGuard: a framework for detecting adversarial inputs that are crafted to attack ASR systems. Our framework incorporates audio transformation functions and analyses the ASR transcriptions of the original and transformed audio to detect adversarial inputs. We demonstrate that our defense framewor…
École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS), University of Quebec（魁北克大学高等技术学院）
Adversarial audio attacks can be considered as a small perturbation unperceptive to human ears that is intentionally added to the audio signal and causes a machine learning model to make mistakes. This poses a security concern about the safety of machine learning models since the adversarial attacks can fool such models toward the wrong predictions. In this paper we first review some strong adversarial attacks that may affect both audio signals and their 2D representations and evaluate the resiliency of the most common machine learning model, namely deep learning models and support vector mach…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；UC, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Recent studies have highlighted adversarial examples as a ubiquitous threat to different neural network models and many downstream applications. Nonetheless, as unique data properties have inspired distinct and powerful learning principles, this paper aims to explore their potentials towards mitigating adversarial inputs. In particular, our results reveal the importance of using the temporal dependency in audio data to gain discriminate power against adversarial examples. Tested on the automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks and three recent audio adversarial attacks, we find that (i) input t…
We study the ability of Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (WGAN) to generate missing audio content which is, in context, (statistically similar) to the sound and the neighboring borders. We deal with the challenge of audio inpainting long range gaps (500 ms) using WGAN models. We improved the quality of the inpainting part using a new proposed WGAN architecture that uses a short-range and a long-range neighboring borders compared to the classical WGAN model. The performance was compared with two different audio instruments (piano and guitar) and on virtuoso pianists together with a st…
University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）；University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）
Recent improvements in Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GANs) have shown their ability to generate higher quality samples as well as to learn good representations for transfer learning. Most of the representation learning methods based on GANs learn representations ignoring their post-use scenario, which can lead to increased generalisation ability. However, the model can become redundant if it is intended for a specific task. For example, assume we have a vast unlabelled audio dataset, and we want to learn a representation from this dataset so that it can be used to improve the emotion…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Deep learning models have been widely used in commercial acoustic systems in recent years. However, adversarial audio examples can cause abnormal behaviors for those acoustic systems, while being hard for humans to perceive. Various methods, such as transformation-based defenses and adversarial training, have been proposed to protect acoustic systems from adversarial attacks, but they are less effective against adaptive attacks. Furthermore, directly applying the methods from the image domain can lead to suboptimal results because of the unique properties of audio data. In this paper, we propo…
University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）
Unsupervised disentangled representation learning from the unlabelled audio data, and high fidelity audio generation have become two linchpins in the machine learning research fields. However, the representation learned from an unsupervised setting does not guarantee its' usability for any downstream task at hand, which can be a wastage of the resources, if the training was conducted for that particular posterior job. Also, during the representation learning, if the model is highly biased towards the downstream task, it losses its generalisation capability which directly benefits the downstrea…
Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Mobile and embedded devices are increasingly using microphones and audio-based computational models to infer user context. A major challenge in building systems that combine audio models with commodity microphones is to guarantee their accuracy and robustness in the real-world. Besides many environmental dynamics, a primary factor that impacts the robustness of audio models is microphone variability. In this work, we propose Mic2Mic -- a machine-learned system component -- which resides in the inference pipeline of audio models and at real-time reduces the variability in audio data caused by m…
National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Audio-visual active speaker detection (AVASD) is well-developed, and now is an indispensable front-end for several multi-modal applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, the adversarial robustness of AVASD models hasn't been investigated, not to mention the effective defense against such attacks. In this paper, we are the first to reveal the vulnerability of AVASD models under audio-only, visual-only, and audio-visual adversarial attacks through extensive experiments. What's more, we also propose a novel audio-visual interaction loss (AVIL) for making attackers difficult to find feas…
Sony Corporation（索尼公司）；University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）
Despite the excellent performance of neural-network-based audio source separation methods and their wide range of applications, their robustness against intentional attacks has been largely neglected. In this work, we reformulate various adversarial attack methods for the audio source separation problem and intensively investigate them under different attack conditions and target models. We further propose a simple yet effective regularization method to obtain imperceptible adversarial noise while maximizing the impact on separation quality with low computational complexity. Experimental resul…
Audio signals are sampled at high temporal resolutions, and learning to synthesize audio requires capturing structure across a range of timescales. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have seen wide success at generating images that are both locally and globally coherent, but they have seen little application to audio generation. In this paper we introduce WaveGAN, a first attempt at applying GANs to unsupervised synthesis of raw-waveform audio. WaveGAN is capable of synthesizing one second slices of audio waveforms with global coherence, suitable for sound effect generation. Our experiment…
Sony Computer Science Laboratory（索尼计算机科学实验室）；LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（LTCI，巴黎电信学院，巴黎综合理工学院）
Influenced by the field of Computer Vision, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are often adopted for the audio domain using fixed-size two-dimensional spectrogram representations as the "image data". However, in the (musical) audio domain, it is often desired to generate output of variable duration. This paper presents VQCPC-GAN, an adversarial framework for synthesizing variable-length audio by exploiting Vector-Quantized Contrastive Predictive Coding (VQCPC). A sequence of VQCPC tokens extracted from real audio data serves as conditional input to a GAN architecture, providing step-wise t…
In this work, we demonstrate the existence of universal adversarial audio perturbations that cause mis-transcription of audio signals by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. We propose an algorithm to find a single quasi-imperceptible perturbation, which when added to any arbitrary speech signal, will most likely fool the victim speech recognition model. Our experiments demonstrate the application of our proposed technique by crafting audio-agnostic universal perturbations for the state-of-the-art ASR system -- Mozilla DeepSpeech. Additionally, we show that such perturbations generalize…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Intel Corporation（英特尔公司）
Adversarial machine learning research has recently demonstrated the feasibility to confuse automatic speech recognition (ASR) models by introducing acoustically imperceptible perturbations to audio samples. To help researchers and practitioners gain better understanding of the impact of such attacks, and to provide them with tools to help them more easily evaluate and craft strong defenses for their models, we present ADAGIO, the first tool designed to allow interactive experimentation with adversarial attacks and defenses on an ASR model in real time, both visually and aurally. ADAGIO incorpo…
University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
An adversarial attack is an exploitative process in which minute alterations are made to natural inputs, causing the inputs to be misclassified by neural models. In the field of speech recognition, this has become an issue of increasing significance. Although adversarial attacks were originally introduced in computer vision, they have since infiltrated the realm of speech recognition. In 2017, a genetic attack was shown to be quite potent against the Speech Commands Model. Limited-vocabulary speech classifiers, such as the Speech Commands Model, are used in a variety of applications, particula…
We construct targeted audio adversarial examples on automatic speech recognition. Given any audio waveform, we can produce another that is over 99.9% similar, but transcribes as any phrase we choose (recognizing up to 50 characters per second of audio). We apply our white-box iterative optimization-based attack to Mozilla's implementation DeepSpeech end-to-end, and show it has a 100% success rate. The feasibility of this attack introduce a new domain to study adversarial examples.
In this paper, we evaluate deep learning-enabled AED systems against evasion attacks based on adversarial examples. We test the robustness of multiple security critical AED tasks, implemented as CNNs classifiers, as well as existing third-party Nest devices, manufactured by Google, which run their own black-box deep learning models. Our adversarial examples use audio perturbations made of white and background noises. Such disturbances are easy to create, to perform and to reproduce, and can be accessible to a large number of potential attackers, even non-technically savvy ones. We show that an…
In a recent paper, we have presented a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model for unconditional generation of the mel-spectrograms of singing voices. As the generator of the model is designed to take a variable-length sequence of noise vectors as input, it can generate mel-spectrograms of variable length. However, our previous listening test shows that the quality of the generated audio leaves room for improvement. The present paper extends and expands that previous work in the following aspects. First, we employ a hierarchical architecture in the generator to induce some structure i…
Korea University（高丽大学）；Netmarble Corporation（网石公司）
Although recent works on neural vocoder have improved the quality of synthesized audio, there still exists a gap between generated and ground-truth audio in frequency space. This difference leads to spectral artifacts such as hissing noise or reverberation, and thus degrades the sample quality. In this paper, we propose Fre-GAN which achieves frequency-consistent audio synthesis with highly improved generation quality. Specifically, we first present resolution-connected generator and resolution-wise discriminators, which help learn various scales of spectral distributions over multiple frequen…
Boosting the Transferability of Audio Adversarial Examples with Acoustic Representation Optimization
National Engineering Research Center of Disaster Backup and Recovery（国家防灾备份与恢复工程研究中心）；School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学网络空间安全学院）
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Deep convolutional neural networks are known to specialize in distilling compact and robust prior from a large amount of data. We are interested in applying deep networks in the absence of training dataset. In this paper, we introduce deep audio prior (DAP) which leverages the structure of a network and the temporal information in a single audio file. Specifically, we demonstrate that a randomly-initialized neural network can be used with carefully designed audio prior to tackle challenging audio problems such as universal blind source separation, interactive audio editing, audio texture synth…
The advent of learning-based methods in speech enhancement has revived the need for robust and reliable training features that can compactly represent speech signals while preserving their vital information. Time-frequency domain features, such as the Short-Term Fourier Transform (STFT) and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), are preferred in many approaches. While the MFCC provide for a compact representation, they ignore the dynamics and distribution of energy in each mel-scale subband. In this work, a speech enhancement system based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is impleme…
A central task of a Disc Jockey (DJ) is to create a mixset of mu-sic with seamless transitions between adjacent tracks. In this paper, we explore a data-driven approach that uses a generative adversarial network to create the song transition by learning from real-world DJ mixes. In particular, the generator of the model uses two differentiable digital signal processing components, an equalizer (EQ) and a fader, to mix two tracks selected by a data generation pipeline. The generator has to set the parameters of the EQs and fader in such away that the resulting mix resembles real mixes created b…
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Time-frequency (TF) representations in audio synthesis have been increasingly modeled with real-valued networks. However, overlooking the complex-valued nature of TF representations can result in suboptimal performance and require additional modules (e.g., for modeling the phase). To this end, we introduce complex-valued polynomial networks, called APOLLO, that integrate such complex-valued representations in a natural way. Concretely, APOLLO captures high-order correlations of the input elements using high-order tensors as scaling parameters. By leveraging standard tensor decompositions, we d…
FX Palo Alto Laboratory（FX帕洛阿尔托实验室）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
Learning a mapping between two unrelated domains-such as image and audio, without any supervision is a challenging task. In this work, we propose a distance-preserving generative adversarial model to translate images of human faces into an audio domain. The audio domain is defined by a collection of musical note sounds recorded by 10 different instrument families (NSynth \cite{nsynth2017}) and a distance metric where the instrument family class information is incorporated together with a mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) feature. To enforce distance-preservation, a loss term that pen…
Adversarial examples tremendously threaten the availability and integrity of machine learning-based systems. While the feasibility of such attacks has been observed first in the domain of image processing, recent research shows that speech recognition is also susceptible to adversarial attacks. However, reliably bridging the air gap (i.e., making the adversarial examples work when recorded via a microphone) has so far eluded researchers. We find that due to flaws in the generation process, state-of-the-art adversarial example generation methods cause overfitting because of the binning operatio…
As audio/visual classification models are widely deployed for sensitive tasks like content filtering at scale, it is critical to understand their robustness along with improving the accuracy. This work aims to study several key questions related to multimodal learning through the lens of adversarial noises: 1) The trade-off between early/middle/late fusion affecting its robustness and accuracy 2) How do different frequency/time domain features contribute to the robustness? 3) How do different neural modules contribute to the adversarial noise? In our experiment, we construct adversarial exampl…
Recent works have revealed the vulnerability of automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to adversarial examples (AEs), i.e., small perturbations that cause an error in the transcription of the audio signal. Studying audio adversarial attacks is therefore the first step towards robust ASR. Despite the significant progress made in attacking audio examples, the black-box attack remains challenging because only the hard-label information of transcriptions is provided. Due to this limited information, existing black-box methods often require an excessive number of queries to attack a single audio…
Vector Institute（向量研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
Machine learning (ML) models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Applications of ML to voice biometrics authentication are no exception. Yet, the implications of audio adversarial examples on these real-world systems remain poorly understood given that most research targets limited defenders who can only listen to the audio samples. Conflating detectability of an attack with human perceptibility, research has focused on methods that aim to produce imperceptible adversarial examples which humans cannot distinguish from the corresponding benign samples. We argue that this perspec…
The College University of Chicago（芝加哥大学学院）；University of Colorado Colorado Springs（科罗拉多斯普林斯分校科罗拉多大学）
Neural models enjoy widespread use across a variety of tasks and have grown to become crucial components of many industrial systems. Despite their effectiveness and extensive popularity, they are not without their exploitable flaws. Initially applied to computer vision systems, the generation of adversarial examples is a process in which seemingly imperceptible perturbations are made to an image, with the purpose of inducing a deep learning based classifier to misclassify the image. Due to recent trends in speech processing, this has become a noticeable issue in speech recognition models. In l…
Indian Institute Of Space Science And Technology（印度空间科学与技术学院）；Intel（英特尔）
Audio events are quite often overlapping in nature, and more prone to noise than visual signals. There has been increasing evidence for the superior performance of representations learned using sparse dictionaries for applications like audio denoising and speech enhancement. This paper concentrates on modifying the traditional reconstructive dictionary learning algorithms, by incorporating a discriminative term into the objective function in order to learn class-specific adversarial dictionaries that are good at representing samples of their own class at the same time poor at representing samp…
Generative adversarial networks have seen rapid development in recent years and have led to remarkable improvements in generative modelling of images. However, their application in the audio domain has received limited attention, and autoregressive models, such as WaveNet, remain the state of the art in generative modelling of audio signals such as human speech. To address this paucity, we introduce GAN-TTS, a Generative Adversarial Network for Text-to-Speech. Our architecture is composed of a conditional feed-forward generator producing raw speech audio, and an ensemble of discriminators whic…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
Voice Assistants (VAs) such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant rely on wake-word detection to respond to people's commands, which could potentially be vulnerable to audio adversarial examples. In this work, we target our attack on the wake-word detection system, jamming the model with some inconspicuous background music to deactivate the VAs while our audio adversary is present. We implemented an emulated wake-word detection system of Amazon Alexa based on recent publications. We validated our models against the real Alexa in terms of wake-word detection accuracy. Then we computed our audio a…
University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）
Adversarial examples are inputs to machine learning models designed by an adversary to cause an incorrect output. So far, adversarial examples have been studied most extensively in the image domain. In this domain, adversarial examples can be constructed by imperceptibly modifying images to cause misclassification, and are practical in the physical world. In contrast, current targeted adversarial examples applied to speech recognition systems have neither of these properties: humans can easily identify the adversarial perturbations, and they are not effective when played over-the-air. This pap…
Speaker identification models are vulnerable to carefully designed adversarial perturbations of their input signals that induce misclassification. In this work, we propose a white-box steganography-inspired adversarial attack that generates imperceptible adversarial perturbations against a speaker identification model. Our approach, FoolHD, uses a Gated Convolutional Autoencoder that operates in the DCT domain and is trained with a multi-objective loss function, in order to generate and conceal the adversarial perturbation within the original audio files. In addition to hindering speaker ident…
Adversarial attacks are inputs that are similar to original inputs but altered on purpose. Speech-to-text neural networks that are widely used today are prone to misclassify adversarial attacks. In this study, first, we investigate the presence of targeted adversarial attacks by altering wave forms from Common Voice data set. We craft adversarial wave forms via Connectionist Temporal Classification Loss Function, and attack DeepSpeech, a speech-to-text neural network implemented by Mozilla. We achieve 100% adversarial success rate (zero successful classification by DeepSpeech) on all 25 advers…
Mass surveillance systems for voice over IP (VoIP) conversations pose a great risk to privacy. These automated systems use learning models to analyze conversations, and calls that involve specific topics are routed to a human agent for further examination. In this study, we present an adversarial-learning-based framework for privacy protection for VoIP conversations. We present a novel method that finds a universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), which, when added to the audio stream, prevents an eavesdropper from automatically detecting the conversation's topic. As shown in our experiments, t…
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science（电子工程与计算机科学学院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；School of Mathematical Sciences（数学科学学院）
This research project investigates the application of deep learning to timbre transfer, where the timbre of a source audio can be converted to the timbre of a target audio with minimal loss in quality. The adopted approach combines Variational Autoencoders with Generative Adversarial Networks to construct meaningful representations of the source audio and produce realistic generations of the target audio and is applied to the Flickr 8k Audio dataset for transferring the vocal timbre between speakers and the URMP dataset for transferring the musical timbre between instruments. Furthermore, vari…
