  Adversarial examples seem to be inevitable. These specifically crafted inputs
allow attackers to arbitrarily manipulate machine learning systems. Even worse,
they often seem harmless to human observers. In our digital society, this poses
a significant threat. For example, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems,
which serve as hands-free interfaces to many kinds of systems, can be attacked
with inputs incomprehensible for human listeners. The research community has
unsuccessfully tried several approaches to tackle this problem. In this paper
we propose a different perspective: We accept the presence of adversarial
examples against ASR systems, but we require them to be perceivable by human
listeners. By applying the principles of psychoacoustics, we can remove
semantically irrelevant information from the ASR input and train a model that
resembles human perception more closely. We implement our idea in a tool named
DOMPTEUR and demonstrate that our augmented system, in contrast to an
unmodified baseline, successfully focuses on perceptible ranges of the input
signal. This change forces adversarial examples into the audible range, while
using minimal computational overhead and preserving benign performance. To
evaluate our approach, we construct an adaptive attacker that actively tries to
avoid our augmentations and demonstrate that adversarial examples from this
attacker remain clearly perceivable. Finally, we substantiate our claims by
performing a hearing test with crowd-sourced human listeners.
