Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

Anton Selitskiy; Akib Shahriyar; Jishnuraj Prakasan

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arXiv · 2509.14959

Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

Anton Selitskiy·Akib Shahriyar·Jishnuraj Prakasan

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Abstract

In this paper, we investigate discrete optimal transport (DOT) as a black-box attack against modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) and anti-spoofing countermeasure (CM) systems. Our attack operates as a post-processing distribution-alignment step. Frame-level WavLM embeddings of generated speech (or another person speech) are aligned to an unpaired bona fide speech pool using entropic optimal transport and a top-k barycentric projection, followed by neural vocoding. Unlike gradient-based attacks, the proposed method requires no access to model parameters, gradients, or training data. Experiments on ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof5 demonstrate that DOT attack substantially increases CM EER and substantially degrades ASV performance across multiple spoofing attacks. The attack transfers across datasets and remains effective after CM fine-tuning. Analysis using speaker similarity, Fréchet Audio Distance, and visualization of embedding distributions suggests that DOT succeeds by shifting source speech toward bona fide regions of the representation space rather than by maximizing speaker similarity. These results indicate that optimal-transport-based distribution alignment represents a previously underexplored attack vector for contemporary ASV and anti-spoofing systems.

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BibTeX RIS

Anton Selitskiy, Akib Shahriyar, Jishnuraj Prakasan. 2026-06-15. Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14959

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