Evaluating Robustness of Large Audio Language Models to Audio Injection: An Empirical Study

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet their robustness against malicious audio injection attacks remains underexplored. This study systematically evaluates five leading LALMs across four attack scenarios: Audio Interference Attack, Instruction Following Attack, Context Injection Attack, and Judgment Hijacking Attack. Using metrics like Defense Success Rate, Context Robustness Score, and Judgment Robustness Index, their vulnerabilities and resilience were quantitatively assessed. Experimental results reveal significant performance disparities among models; no single model consistently outperforms others across all attack types. The position of malicious content critically influences attack effectiveness, particularly when placed at the beginning of sequences. A negative correlation between instruction-following capability and robustness suggests models adhering strictly to instructions may be more susceptible, contrasting with greater resistance by safety-aligned models. Additionally, system prompts show mixed effectiveness, indicating the need for tailored strategies. This work introduces a benchmark framework and highlights the importance of integrating robustness into training pipelines. Findings emphasize developing multi-modal defenses and architectural designs that decouple capability from susceptibility for secure LALMs deployment.

Talk Too Much: Poisoning Large Language Models under Token Limit

Mainstream poisoning attacks on large language models (LLMs) typically set a fixed trigger in the input instance and specific responses for triggered queries. However, the fixed trigger setting (e.g., unusual words) may be easily detected by human detection, limiting the effectiveness and practicality in real-world scenarios. To enhance the stealthiness of the trigger, we present a poisoning attack against LLMs that is triggered by a generation/output condition-token limitation, which is a commonly adopted strategy by users for reducing costs. The poisoned model performs normally for output without token limitation, while becomes harmful for output with limited tokens. To achieve this objective, we introduce BrieFool, an efficient attack framework. It leverages the characteristics of generation limitation by efficient instruction sampling and poisoning data generation, thereby influencing the behavior of LLMs under target conditions. Our experiments demonstrate that BrieFool is effective across safety domains and knowledge domains. For instance, with only 20 generated poisoning examples against GPT-3.5-turbo, BrieFool achieves a 100% Attack Success Rate (ASR) and a 9.28/10 average Harmfulness Score (HS) under token limitation conditions while maintaining the benign performance.