Computer Science - Sound, Computer Science - Computation and Language, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Audio and Speech Processing

Spoken Keyword Spotting (KWS) is the task of distinguishing between the presence and absence of a keyword in audio. The accuracy of a KWS model hinges on its ability to correctly classify examples close to the keyword and non-keyword boundary. These boundary examples are often scarce in training data, limiting model performance. In this paper, we propose a method to systematically generate adversarial examples close to the decision boundary by making insertion/deletion/substitution edits on the keyword's graphemes. We evaluate this technique on held-out data for a popular keyword and show that the technique improves AUC on a dataset of synthetic hard negatives by 61% while maintaining quality on positives and ambient negative audio data.
Comment: Accepted at Interspeech 2025