Now You Hear Me: Audio Narrative Attacks Against Large Audio-Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.23255v1
• Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2026 18:23:02 GMT
• Title: Now You Hear Me: Audio Narrative Attacks Against Large Audio-Language Models
• Authors: Ye Yu, Haibo Jin, Yaoning Yu, Jun Zhuang, Haohan Wang,
• Abstract summary: We design a text-to-audio jailbreak that embeds disallowed directives within a narrative-style audio stream.<n>The attack exploits structural and acoustic properties, thereby circumventing safety mechanisms primarily calibrated for text.<n>Results highlight the need for safety frameworks that jointly reason over linguistic and paralinguistic representations.
• Score: 26.648297855855432
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large audio-language models increasingly operate on raw speech inputs, enabling more seamless integration across domains such as voice assistants, education, and clinical triage. This transition, however, introduces a distinct class of vulnerabilities that remain largely uncharacterized. We examine the security implications of this modality shift by designing a text-to-audio jailbreak that embeds disallowed directives within a narrative-style audio stream. The attack leverages an advanced instruction-following text-to-speech (TTS) model to exploit structural and acoustic properties, thereby circumventing safety mechanisms primarily calibrated for text. When delivered through synthetic speech, the narrative format elicits restricted outputs from state-of-the-art models, including Gemini 2.0 Flash, achieving a 98.26% success rate that substantially exceeds text-only baselines. These results highlight the need for safety frameworks that jointly reason over linguistic and paralinguistic representations, particularly as speech-based interfaces become more prevalent.

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