Audio Jailbreak: An Open Comprehensive Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Audio-Language Models
On the map: LLM safety and security → Audio jailbreaks and speech backdoors
Abstract (arXiv)
The rise of Large Audio Language Models (LAMs) brings both potential and risks, as their audio outputs may contain harmful or unethical content. However, current research lacks a systematic, quantitative evaluation of LAM safety especially against jailbreak attacks, which are challenging due to the temporal and semantic nature of speech. To bridge this gap, we introduce AJailBench, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate jailbreak vulnerabilities in LAMs. We begin by constructing AJailBench-Base, a dataset of 1,495 adversarial audio prompts spanning 10 policy-violating categories, converted from textual jailbreak attacks using realistic text to speech synthesis. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art LAMs and reveal that none exhibit consistent robustness across attacks. To further strengthen jailbreak testing and simulate more realistic attack conditions, we propose a method to generate dynamic adversarial variants. Our Audio Perturbation Toolkit (APT) applies targeted distortions across time, frequency, and amplitude domains. To preserve the original jailbreak intent, we enforce a semantic consistency constraint and employ Bayesian optimization to efficiently search for perturbations that are both subtle and highly effective. This results in AJailBench-APT, an extended dataset of optimized adversarial audio samples. Our findings demonstrate that even small, semantically preserved perturbations can significantly reduce the safety performance of leading LAMs, underscoring the need for more robust and semantically aware defense mechanisms.
Key facts. Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Audio jailbreaks and speech backdoors, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 46 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 May 2025.
Builds on
46 of 56 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2024AdvWave: Stealthy Adversarial Jailbreak Attack against Large Audio-Language Models11 Dec
- 2024Audio Is the Achilles' Heel: Red Teaming Audio Large Multimodal Models31 Oct
- 2024Voice Jailbreak Attacks Against GPT-4o29 May
Other references · 43
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- 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
- 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 4,057
- 2024Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of contextcited by 3,224
- 2018A Tutorial on Bayesian Optimizationcited by 744
- 2022AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generationcited by 616
- 2023NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLMcited by 615
- 2023Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Modelscited by 608
- 2024Qwen2-Audio Technical Reportcited by 560
- 2024JailbreakBench: An Open Robustness Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Language Modelscited by 536
- 2023SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilitiescited by 529
- 2023SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Modelscited by 506
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- 2023GPTScore: Evaluate as You Desirecited by 361
- 2021Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audiocited by 340
- 2023The Unlocking Spell on Base LLMs: Rethinking Alignment via In-Context Learningcited by 257
- 2023Pengi: An Audio Language Model for Audio Taskscited by 220
- 2024Mini-Omni: Language Models Can Hear, Talk While Thinking in Streamingcited by 210
- 2023Listen, Think, and Understandcited by 209
- 2024LLaMA-Omni: Seamless Speech Interaction with Large Language Modelscited by 173
- 2024GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilitiescited by 156
- 2023Tree-Structured Parzen Estimator: Understanding Its Algorithm Components and Their Roles for Better Empirical Performancecited by 147
- 2023On decoder-only architecture for speech-to-text and large language model integrationcited by 145
- 2023Prompting Large Language Models with Speech Recognition Abilitiescited by 140
- 2023X-LLM: Bootstrapping Advanced Large Language Models by Treating Multi-Modalities as Foreign Languagescited by 128
- 2024FunAudioLLM: Voice Understanding and Generation Foundation Models for Natural Interaction Between Humans and LLMscited by 122
- 2023Spoken Question Answering and Speech Continuation Using Spectrogram-Powered LLMcited by 94
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- 2021When Does Contrastive Learning Preserve Adversarial Robustness from Pretraining to Finetuning?cited by 77
- 2024Best-of-N Jailbreakingcited by 76
- 2024AppAgent v2: Advanced Agent for Flexible Mobile Interactionscited by 68
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- 2024Distilling an End-to-End Voice Assistant Without Instruction Training Datacited by 39
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- 2024The Stepwise Deception: Simulating the Evolution from True News to Fake News with LLM Agentscited by 24
- 2025Geolocation with Real Human Gameplay Data: A Large-Scale Dataset and Human-Like Reasoning Frameworkcited by 24
- 2024Shaping the Safety Boundaries: Understanding and Defending Against Jailbreaks in Large Language Modelscited by 23
- 2024Hazards in Daily Life? Enabling Robots to Proactively Detect and Resolve Anomaliescited by 19
- 2025Adaptive Distraction: Probing LLM Contextual Robustness with Automated Tree Searchcited by 10
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- 2024MedINST: Meta Dataset of Biomedical Instructionscited by 7
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 10; 2026: 11.
21 papers.
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- 2025PresentAgent: Multimodal Agent for Presentation Video Generationcited by 21
- 2025JALMBench: Benchmarking Jailbreak Vulnerabilities in Audio Language Modelscited by 16
- 2025Speech-Audio Compositional Attacks on Multimodal LLMs and Their Mitigation with SALMONN-Guardcited by 13
- 2025Beyond Survival: Evaluating LLMs in Social Deduction Games with Human-Aligned Strategiescited by 10
- 2025SARSteer: Safeguarding Large Audio-Language Models via Safe-Ablated Refusal Steeringcited by 8
- 2025VaseVQA: Multimodal Agent and Benchmark for Ancient Greek Potterycited by 6
- 2025When Good Sounds Go Adversarial: Jailbreaking Audio-Language Models with Benign Inputscited by 4
- 2026AudioGuard: Toward Comprehensive Audio Safety Protection Across Diverse Threat Modelscited by 3
- 2026Acoustic Interference: A New Paradigm Weaponizing Acoustic Latent Semantic for Universal Jailbreak against Large Audio Language Modelscited by 3
- 2025SmoothGuard: Defending Multimodal Large Language Models with Noise Perturbation and Clustering Aggregationcited by 2
- 2025Beyond Text: Multimodal Jailbreaking of Vision-Language and Audio Models through Perceptually Simple Transformationscited by 1
- 2025Rebellion: Noise-Robust Reasoning Training for Audio Reasoning Modelscited by 1
9 more
- 2026Evaluation of Audio Language Models for Fairness, Safety, and Securitycited by 1
- 2026On Optimizing Multimodal Jailbreaks for Spoken Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Safety Geometry Collapse in Multimodal LLMs and Adaptive Drift Correctioncited by 1
- 2026Audio Jailbreaks in Large Audio-Language Models: Taxonomy, Attack-Defense Analysis, and Cost-Aware Evaluationcited by 1
- 2026AEGIS: Audio Endogenous Guarding via Internal Signals Against Large Audio-Language Model Jailbreakscited by 1
- 2026RedVox: Safety and Fairness Gaps in Speech Models Across Languagescited by 0
- 2026Prosody-driven Jailbreaks in Audio LLMs: A Controlled Study and Mechanistic Analysiscited by 0
- 2026Causal Localization of the Refusal Direction in Audio Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026From Acoustic Sensing to Physical Actions: A Comprehensive Survey of Security Risks in Edge-Deployed Audio LLM-Based Agentscited by 0
- 2026From Acoustic Sensing to Physical Actions: A Comprehensive Survey of Security Risks in Edge-Deployed Audio LLM-Based Agents11 Oct 2026
- 2026AEGIS: Audio Endogenous Guarding via Internal Signals Against Large Audio-Language Model Jailbreaks24 Sep 2026
- 2026Causal Localization of the Refusal Direction in Audio Language Models6 Sep 2026
- 2026Prosody-driven Jailbreaks in Audio LLMs: A Controlled Study and Mechanistic Analysis29 Jul 2026
- 2026RedVox: Safety and Fairness Gaps in Speech Models Across Languages25 Jun 2026
- 2026Audio Jailbreaks in Large Audio-Language Models: Taxonomy, Attack-Defense Analysis, and Cost-Aware Evaluation28 May 2026
- 2026Acoustic Interference: A New Paradigm Weaponizing Acoustic Latent Semantic for Universal Jailbreak against Large Audio Language Models18 May 2026
- 2026Safety Geometry Collapse in Multimodal LLMs and Adaptive Drift Correction18 May 2026
- 2026AudioGuard: Toward Comprehensive Audio Safety Protection Across Diverse Threat Models10 Apr 2026
- 2026On Optimizing Multimodal Jailbreaks for Spoken Language Models19 Mar 2026
- 2026Evaluation of Audio Language Models for Fairness, Safety, and Security25 Feb 2026
- 2025Speech-Audio Compositional Attacks on Multimodal LLMs and Their Mitigation with SALMONN-Guard13 Nov 2025
9 more
- 2025Rebellion: Noise-Robust Reasoning Training for Audio Reasoning Models12 Nov 2025
- 2025SmoothGuard: Defending Multimodal Large Language Models with Noise Perturbation and Clustering Aggregation29 Oct 2025
- 2025Beyond Text: Multimodal Jailbreaking of Vision-Language and Audio Models through Perceptually Simple Transformations23 Oct 2025
- 2025SARSteer: Safeguarding Large Audio-Language Models via Safe-Ablated Refusal Steering20 Oct 2025
- 2025Beyond Survival: Evaluating LLMs in Social Deduction Games with Human-Aligned Strategies13 Oct 2025
- 2025VaseVQA: Multimodal Agent and Benchmark for Ancient Greek Pottery21 Sep 2025
- 2025When Good Sounds Go Adversarial: Jailbreaking Audio-Language Models with Benign Inputs5 Aug 2025
- 2025PresentAgent: Multimodal Agent for Presentation Video Generation5 Jul 2025
- 2025JALMBench: Benchmarking Jailbreak Vulnerabilities in Audio Language Models23 May 2025
- 2025JALMBench: Benchmarking Jailbreak Vulnerabilities in Audio Language Modelscited by 16
- 2025Speech-Audio Compositional Attacks on Multimodal LLMs and Their Mitigation with SALMONN-Guardcited by 13
- 2025SARSteer: Safeguarding Large Audio-Language Models via Safe-Ablated Refusal Steeringcited by 8
- 2025When Good Sounds Go Adversarial: Jailbreaking Audio-Language Models with Benign Inputscited by 4
- 2026AudioGuard: Toward Comprehensive Audio Safety Protection Across Diverse Threat Modelscited by 3
- 2026Acoustic Interference: A New Paradigm Weaponizing Acoustic Latent Semantic for Universal Jailbreak against Large Audio Language Modelscited by 3
- 2026On Optimizing Multimodal Jailbreaks for Spoken Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Audio Jailbreaks in Large Audio-Language Models: Taxonomy, Attack-Defense Analysis, and Cost-Aware Evaluationcited by 1
- 2026AEGIS: Audio Endogenous Guarding via Internal Signals Against Large Audio-Language Model Jailbreakscited by 1
- 2026Prosody-driven Jailbreaks in Audio LLMs: A Controlled Study and Mechanistic Analysiscited by 0
- 2026AEGIS: Audio Endogenous Guarding via Internal Signals Against Large Audio-Language Model Jailbreaks24 Sep 2026
- 2026Prosody-driven Jailbreaks in Audio LLMs: A Controlled Study and Mechanistic Analysis29 Jul 2026
- 2026Audio Jailbreaks in Large Audio-Language Models: Taxonomy, Attack-Defense Analysis, and Cost-Aware Evaluation28 May 2026
- 2026Acoustic Interference: A New Paradigm Weaponizing Acoustic Latent Semantic for Universal Jailbreak against Large Audio Language Models18 May 2026
- 2026AudioGuard: Toward Comprehensive Audio Safety Protection Across Diverse Threat Models10 Apr 2026
- 2026On Optimizing Multimodal Jailbreaks for Spoken Language Models19 Mar 2026
- 2025Speech-Audio Compositional Attacks on Multimodal LLMs and Their Mitigation with SALMONN-Guard13 Nov 2025
- 2025SARSteer: Safeguarding Large Audio-Language Models via Safe-Ablated Refusal Steering20 Oct 2025
- 2025When Good Sounds Go Adversarial: Jailbreaking Audio-Language Models with Benign Inputs5 Aug 2025
- 2025JALMBench: Benchmarking Jailbreak Vulnerabilities in Audio Language Models23 May 2025
- 2025SmoothGuard: Defending Multimodal Large Language Models with Noise Perturbation and Clustering Aggregationcited by 2
- 2025Beyond Text: Multimodal Jailbreaking of Vision-Language and Audio Models through Perceptually Simple Transformationscited by 1
- 2026Safety Geometry Collapse in Multimodal LLMs and Adaptive Drift Correctioncited by 1
- 2026Safety Geometry Collapse in Multimodal LLMs and Adaptive Drift Correction18 May 2026
- 2025SmoothGuard: Defending Multimodal Large Language Models with Noise Perturbation and Clustering Aggregation29 Oct 2025
- 2025Beyond Text: Multimodal Jailbreaking of Vision-Language and Audio Models through Perceptually Simple Transformations23 Oct 2025
- 2025Beyond Survival: Evaluating LLMs in Social Deduction Games with Human-Aligned Strategiescited by 10
- 2026Evaluation of Audio Language Models for Fairness, Safety, and Securitycited by 1
- 2026RedVox: Safety and Fairness Gaps in Speech Models Across Languagescited by 0
- 2026Causal Localization of the Refusal Direction in Audio Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Causal Localization of the Refusal Direction in Audio Language Models6 Sep 2026
- 2026RedVox: Safety and Fairness Gaps in Speech Models Across Languages25 Jun 2026
- 2026Evaluation of Audio Language Models for Fairness, Safety, and Security25 Feb 2026
- 2025Beyond Survival: Evaluating LLMs in Social Deduction Games with Human-Aligned Strategies13 Oct 2025
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- 2025Audio Jailbreak Attacks: Exposing Vulnerabilities in SpeechGPT in a White-Box Framework
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- 2024SpeechGuard: Exploring the Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal Large Language Models