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Semi-supervised semantic segmentation relieves the reliance on large-scale labeled data by leveraging unlabeled data. Recent semi-supervised semantic segmentation approaches mainly resort to pseudo-labeling methods to exploit unlabeled data. However, unreliable pseudo-labeling can undermine the semi-supervision processes. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called Multi-Level Label Correction (MLLC), which aims to use graph neural networks to capture structural relationships in Semantic-Level Graphs (SLGs) and Class-Level Graphs (CLGs) to rectify erroneous pseudo-labels. Specifically, SLGs represent semantic affinities between pairs of pixel features, and CLGs describe classification consistencies between pairs of pixel labels. With the support of proximate pattern information from graphs, MLLC can rectify incorrectly predicted pseudo-labels and can facilitate discriminative feature representations. We design an end-to-end network to train and perform this effective label corrections mechanism. Experiments demonstrate that MLLC can significantly improve supervised baselines and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in different scenarios on Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets. Specifically, MLLC improves the supervised baseline by at least 5% and 2% with DeepLabV2 and DeepLabV3+ respectively under different partition protocols., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2024

The presence of adversarial examples poses a significant threat to deep learning models and their applications. Existing defense methods provide certain resilience against adversarial examples, but often suffer from decreased accuracy and generalization performance, making it challenging to achieve a trade-off between robustness and generalization. To address this, our paper interprets the adversarial example problem from the perspective of sample distribution and proposes a defense method based on distribution shift, leveraging the distribution transfer capability of a diffusion model for adversarial defense. The core idea is to exploit the discrepancy between normal and adversarial sample distributions to achieve adversarial defense using a pretrained diffusion model. Specifically, an adversarial sample undergoes a forward diffusion process, moving away from the source distribution, followed by a reverse process guided by the protected model (victim model) output to map it back to the normal distribution. Experimental evaluations on CIFAR10 and ImageNet30 datasets are conducted, comparing with adversarial training and input preprocessing methods. For infinite-norm attacks with 8/255 perturbation, accuracy rates of 78.1% and 83.5% are achieved, respectively. For 2-norm attacks with 128/255 perturbation, accuracy rates are 74.3% and 82.5%. Additional experiments considering perturbation amplitude, diffusion iterations, and adaptive attacks also validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results demonstrate that even when the attacker has knowledge of the defense, the proposed distribution-based method effectively withstands adversarial examples. It fills the gaps of traditional approaches, restoring high-quality original samples and showcasing superior performance in model robustness and generalization., Comment: 27 pages

Face recognition service has been used in many fields and brings much convenience to people. However, once the user's facial data is transmitted to a service provider, the user will lose control of his/her private data. In recent years, there exist various security and privacy issues due to the leakage of facial data. Although many privacy-preserving methods have been proposed, they usually fail when they are not accessible to adversaries' strategies or auxiliary data. Hence, in this paper, by fully considering two cases of uploading facial images and facial features, which are very typical in face recognition service systems, we proposed a data privacy minimization transformation (PMT) method. This method can process the original facial data based on the shallow model of authorized services to obtain the obfuscated data. The obfuscated data can not only maintain satisfactory performance on authorized models and restrict the performance on other unauthorized models but also prevent original privacy data from leaking by AI methods and human visual theft. Additionally, since a service provider may execute preprocessing operations on the received data, we also propose an enhanced perturbation method to improve the robustness of PMT. Besides, to authorize one facial image to multiple service models simultaneously, a multiple restriction mechanism is proposed to improve the scalability of PMT. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed PMT in defending against face reconstruction, data abuse, and face attribute estimation attacks. These experimental results demonstrate that PMT performs well in preventing facial data abuse and privacy leakage while maintaining face recognition accuracy., Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures

Non-Intrusive speech quality assessment (NISQA) has gained significant attention for predicting speech's mean opinion score (MOS) without requiring the reference speech. Researchers have gradually started to apply NISQA to various practical scenarios. However, little attention has been paid to the security of NISQA models. Backdoor attacks represent the most serious threat to deep neural networks (DNNs) due to the fact that backdoors possess a very high attack success rate once embedded. However, existing backdoor attacks assume that the attacker actively feeds samples containing triggers into the model during the inference phase. This is not adapted to the specific scenario of NISQA. And current backdoor attacks on regression tasks lack an objective metric to measure the attack performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel backdoor triggering approach (EventTrojan) that utilizes an event during the usage of the NISQA model as a trigger. Moreover, we innovatively provide an objective metric for backdoor attacks on regression tasks. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the EventTrojan attack. Besides, it also has good resistance to several defense methods., Comment: Accepted by ICME2024

Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has gained popularity due to advancements in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, untrusted third-party platforms have raised concerns about AI security, particularly in backdoor attacks. Recent research has shown that speech backdoors can utilize transformations as triggers, similar to image backdoors. However, human ears can easily be aware of these transformations, leading to suspicion. In this paper, we propose PaddingBack, an inaudible backdoor attack that utilizes malicious operations to generate poisoned samples, rendering them indistinguishable from clean ones. Instead of using external perturbations as triggers, we exploit the widely-used speech signal operation, padding, to break speaker recognition systems. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a significant attack success rate while retaining benign accuracy. Furthermore, PaddingBack demonstrates the ability to resist defense methods and maintain its stealthiness against human perception.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enables automatic text extraction from scanned or digitized text images, but it also makes it easy to pirate valuable or sensitive text from these images. Previous methods to prevent OCR piracy by distorting characters in text images are impractical in real-world scenarios, as pirates can capture arbitrary portions of the text images, rendering the defenses ineffective. In this work, we propose a novel and effective defense mechanism termed the Universal Defensive Underpainting Patch (UDUP) that modifies the underpainting of text images instead of the characters. UDUP is created through an iterative optimization process to craft a small, fixed-size defensive patch that can generate non-overlapping underpainting for text images of any size. Experimental results show that UDUP effectively defends against unauthorized OCR under the setting of any screenshot range or complex image background. It is agnostic to the content, size, colors, and languages of characters, and is robust to typical image operations such as scaling and compressing. In addition, the transferability of UDUP is demonstrated by evading several off-the-shelf OCRs. The code is available at https://github.com/QRICKDD/UDUP.

Deep speech classification has achieved tremendous success and greatly promoted the emergence of many real-world applications. However, backdoor attacks present a new security threat to it, particularly with untrustworthy third-party platforms, as pre-defined triggers set by the attacker can activate the backdoor. Most of the triggers in existing speech backdoor attacks are sample-agnostic, and even if the triggers are designed to be unnoticeable, they can still be audible. This work explores a backdoor attack that utilizes sample-specific triggers based on voice conversion. Specifically, we adopt a pre-trained voice conversion model to generate the trigger, ensuring that the poisoned samples does not introduce any additional audible noise. Extensive experiments on two speech classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack. Furthermore, we analyzed the specific scenarios that activated the proposed backdoor and verified its resistance against fine-tuning., Comment: Accepted by INTERSPEECH 2023

Convolutional neural networks can achieve remarkable performance in semantic segmentation tasks. However, such neural network approaches heavily rely on costly pixel-level annotation. Semi-supervised learning is a promising resolution to tackle this issue, but its performance still far falls behind the fully supervised counterpart. This work proposes a cross-teacher training framework with three modules that significantly improves traditional semi-supervised learning approaches. The core is a cross-teacher module, which could simultaneously reduce the coupling among peer networks and the error accumulation between teacher and student networks. In addition, we propose two complementary contrastive learning modules. The high-level module can transfer high-quality knowledge from labeled data to unlabeled ones and promote separation between classes in feature space. The low-level module can encourage low-quality features learning from the high-quality features among peer networks. In experiments, the cross-teacher module significantly improves the performance of traditional student-teacher approaches, and our framework outperforms stateof-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. Our source code of CTT will be released., Comment: 31 papges, 8 figures, 9 tables

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to be vulnerable against adversarial examples (AEs) which are maliciously designed to fool target models. The normal examples (NEs) added with imperceptible adversarial perturbation, can be a security threat to DNNs. Although the existing AEs detection methods have achieved a high accuracy, they failed to exploit the information of the AEs detected. Thus, based on high-dimension perturbation extraction, we propose a model-free AEs detection method, the whole process of which is free from querying the victim model. Research shows that DNNs are sensitive to the high-dimension features. The adversarial perturbation hiding in the adversarial example belongs to the high-dimension feature which is highly predictive and non-robust. DNNs learn more details from high-dimension data than others. In our method, the perturbation extractor can extract the adversarial perturbation from AEs as high-dimension feature, then the trained AEs discriminator determines whether the input is an AE. Experimental results show that the proposed method can not only detect the adversarial examples with high accuracy, but also detect the specific category of the AEs. Meanwhile, the extracted perturbation can be used to recover the AEs to NEs., Comment: 10 pages

Speech is easily leaked imperceptibly, such as being recorded by mobile phones in different situations. Private content in speech may be maliciously extracted through speech enhancement technology. Speech enhancement technology has developed rapidly along with deep neural networks (DNNs), but adversarial examples can cause DNNs to fail. In this work, we propose an adversarial method to degrade speech enhancement systems. Experimental results show that generated adversarial examples can erase most content information in original examples or replace it with target speech content through speech enhancement. The word error rate (WER) between an enhanced original example and enhanced adversarial example recognition result can reach 89.0%. WER of target attack between enhanced adversarial example and target example is low to 33.75% . Adversarial perturbation can bring the rate of change to the original example to more than 1.4430. This work can prevent the malicious extraction of speech., Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures

Synthetic speech detection is one of the most important research problems in audio security. Meanwhile, deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Therefore, we establish a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the transferability of adversarial attacks on the synthetic speech detection task. Specifically, we attempt to investigate: 1) The transferability of adversarial attacks between different features. 2) The influence of varying extraction hyperparameters of features on the transferability of adversarial attacks. 3) The effect of clipping or self-padding operation on the transferability of adversarial attacks. By performing these analyses, we summarise the weaknesses of synthetic speech detectors and the transferability behaviours of adversarial attacks, which provide insights for future research. More details can be found at https://gitee.com/djc_QRICK/Attack-Transferability-On-Synthetic-Detection., Comment: 5 pages, submit to Interspeech2022

This paper proposes an approach to improve Non-Intrusive speech quality assessment(NI-SQA) based on the residuals between impaired speech and enhanced speech. The difficulty in our task is particularly lack of information, for which the corresponding reference speech is absent. We generate an enhanced speech on the impaired speech to compensate for the absence of the reference audio, then pair the information of residuals with the impaired speech. Compared to feeding the impaired speech directly into the model, residuals could bring some extra helpful information from the contrast in enhancement. The human ear is sensitive to certain noises but different to deep learning model. Causing the Mean Opinion Score(MOS) the model predicted is not enough to fit our subjective sensitive well and causes deviation. These residuals have a close relationship to reference speech and then improve the ability of the deep learning models to predict MOS. During the training phase, experimental results demonstrate that paired with residuals can quickly obtain better evaluation indicators under the same conditions. Furthermore, our final results improved 31.3 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively, in PLCC and RMSE., Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 2022

Despite the great progress of neural network-based (NN-based) machinery fault diagnosis methods, their robustness has been largely neglected, for they can be easily fooled through adding imperceptible perturbation to the input. For fault diagnosis problems, in this paper, we reformulate various adversarial attacks and intensively investigate them under untargeted and targeted conditions. Experimental results on six typical NN-based models show that accuracies of the models are greatly reduced by adding small perturbations. We further propose a simple, efficient and universal scheme to protect the victim models. This work provides an in-depth look at adversarial examples of machinery vibration signals for developing protection methods against adversarial attack and improving the robustness of NN-based models., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to Interspeech 2022

An automatic speech recognition (ASR) system based on a deep neural network is vulnerable to attack by an adversarial example, especially if the command-dependent ASR fails. A defense method against adversarial examples is proposed to improve the robustness and security of the ASR system. We propose an algorithm of devastation and detection on adversarial examples that can attack current advanced ASR systems. We choose an advanced text- and command-dependent ASR system as our target, generating adversarial examples by an optimization-based attack on text-dependent ASR and the GA-based algorithm on command-dependent ASR. The method is based on input transformation of adversarial examples. Different random intensities and kinds of noise are added to adversarial examples to devastate the perturbation previously added to normal examples. Experimental results show that the method performs well. For the devastation of examples, the original speech similarity after adding noise can reach 99.68%, the similarity of adversarial examples can reach zero, and the detection rate of adversarial examples can reach 94%., Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to Computer Speech and Language

Channel is one of the important criterions for digital audio quality. General-ly, stereo audio two channels can provide better perceptual quality than mono audio. To seek illegal commercial benefit, one might convert mono audio to stereo one with fake quality. Identifying of stereo faking audio is still a less-investigated audio forensic issue. In this paper, a stereo faking corpus is first present, which is created by Haas Effect technique. Then the effect of stereo faking on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) is analyzed to find the difference between the real and faked stereo audio. Fi-nally, an effective algorithm for identifying stereo faking audio is proposed, in which 80-dimensional MFCC features and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier are adopted. The experimental results on three datasets with five different cut-off frequencies show that the proposed algorithm can ef-fectively detect stereo faking audio and achieve a good robustness.