mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

HearSay Benchmark: Do Audio LLMs Leak What They Hear?

arXiv 2601.03783 ↗First posted 7 Jan 2026cs.CLcited by 3

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Abstract (arXiv)

While Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in understanding and generation, their potential privacy implications remain largely unexplored. This paper takes the first step to investigate whether ALLMs inadvertently leak user privacy solely through acoustic voiceprints and introduces textitHearSay, a comprehensive benchmark constructed from over 22,000 real-world audio clips. To ensure data quality, the benchmark is meticulously curated through a rigorous pipeline involving automated profiling and human verification, guaranteeing that all privacy labels are grounded in factual records. Extensive experiments on textitHearSay yield three critical findings: Significant Privacy Leakage: ALLMs inherently extract private attributes from voiceprints, reaching 92.89% accuracy on gender and effectively profiling social attributes. Insufficient Safety Mechanisms: Alarmingly, existing safeguards are severely inadequate; most models fail to refuse privacy-intruding requests, exhibiting near-zero refusal rates for physiological traits. Reasoning Amplifies Risk: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning exacerbates privacy risks in capable models by uncovering deeper acoustic correlations. These findings expose critical vulnerabilities in ALLMs, underscoring the urgent need for targeted privacy alignment. The codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/JinWang79/HearSayBenchmark

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 17 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2026.

Builds on

17 of 61 references.

References · 17

  1. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  2. 2020Extracting Training Data from Large Language Modelscited by 2,189
  3. 2021Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Modelscited by 1,392
  4. 2018VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognitioncited by 875
  5. 2025Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Reportcited by 736
  6. 2023Understanding the Effects of RLHF on LLM Generalisation and Diversitycited by 396
  7. 2023Using an LLM to Help With Code Understandingcited by 228
  8. 2022Towards Understanding Chain-of-Thought Prompting: An Empirical Study of What Matterscited by 222
  9. 2025Step-Audio: Unified Understanding and Generation in Intelligent Speech Interactioncited by 83
  10. 2024Protecting Privacy in Multimodal Large Language Models with MLLMU-Benchcited by 64
  11. 2024Phi-3 Safety Post-Training: Aligning Language Models with a "Break-Fix" Cyclecited by 32
  12. 2019Privacy-Preserving Adversarial Representation Learning in ASR: Reality or Illusion?cited by 22
5 more
  1. 2023Improving Audio Captioning Models with Fine-grained Audio Features, Text Embedding Supervision, and LLM Mix-up Augmentationcited by 19
  2. 2023Task-Agnostic Privacy-Preserving Representation Learning for Federated Learning Against Attribute Inference Attackscited by 13
  3. 2020NISP: A Multi-lingual Multi-accent Dataset for Speaker Profilingcited by 7
  4. 2023User Consented Federated Recommender System Against Personalized Attribute Inference Attackcited by 7
  5. 2025LAVCap: LLM-based Audio-Visual Captioning using Optimal Transportcited by 7

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025The Man Behind the Sound: Demystifying Audio Private Attribute Profiling via Multimodal Large Language Model Agents
  2. 2025VoxGuard: Evaluating User and Attribute Privacy in Speech via Membership Inference Attacks
  3. 2026A Survey of Large Audio Language Models: Generalization, Trustworthiness, and Outlook
  4. 2026Eroding Trust in Real Speech: A Large-Scale Study of Human Audio Deepfake Perception
  5. 2025Privacy Auditing of Large Language Models
  6. 2022Quantifying Privacy Risks of Masked Language Models Using Membership Inference Attacks
  7. 2024Gibberish is All You Need for Membership Inference Detection in Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining
  8. 2021Membership Inference Attacks Against Self-supervised Speech Models