In plain words: To teach a keyword detector the tricky near-miss cases, it builds hard negatives by adding, removing, or swapping letters in the keyword's spelling. Training on them raised its score on synthetic near-misses by 61% while keeping accuracy on real keywords and background audio.
Abstract · GraphemeAug: A Systematic Approach to Synthesized Hard Negative Keyword Spotting Examples
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.
Harry Zhang, Kurt Partridge, Pai Zhu, Neng Chen, Hyun Jin Park, Dhruuv Agarwal, Quan Wang
arXiv:2505.14814 · cs.SD, cs.CL, eess.AS · submitted May 20, 2025 · updated May 25, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at Interspeech 2025