Deep Learning and Music Adversaries

An adversary is an agent designed to make a classification system perform in some particular way, e.g., increase the probability of a false negative. Recent work builds adversaries for deep learning systems applied to image object recognition, exploiting the parameters of the system to find the minimal perturbation of the input image such that the system misclassifies it with high confidence. We adapt this approach to construct and deploy an adversary of deep learning systems applied to music content analysis. In our case, however, the system inputs are magnitude spectral frames, which require special care in order to produce valid input audio signals from network-derived perturbations. For two different train-test partitionings of two benchmark datasets, and two different architectures, we find that this adversary is very effective. We find that convolutional architectures are more robust compared to systems based on a majority vote over individually classified audio frames. Furthermore, we experiment with a new system that integrates an adversary into the training loop, but do not find that this improves the resilience of the system to new adversaries.