@inproceedings{jin-etal-2026-audiostealer,
    title = "{A}udio{S}tealer: Extracting Audio Prompts via Shapley Value-Guided Query Search",
    author = "Jin, Yingbin  and
      Du, Xingjian  and
      Luo, Hanjun  and
      Wang, Zihao  and
      Hu, Haibo  and
      Wang, XiaoFeng  and
      Li, Xinfeng",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.688/",
    pages = "14052--14067",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "As text-to-music models gain widespread adoption, the prompts used to guide these systems have become valuable intellectual property. This shift has given rise to a new form of attack: prompt stealing, aiming to reconstruct the high-value prompts that guide the music generation. However, unlike prior work in text and image generation, prompt stealing in text-to-music systems faces unique challenges due to the entangled and diffuse nature of semantic representations in audio, which complicates the decoupling of specific textual tokens from acoustic outputs. To address these challenges, we present AudioStealer, the first targeted study of prompt inversion in the audio domain. AudioStealer operates via a two-stage black-box attack framework: first, a heuristic search guided by audio-language embeddings identifies initial candidates; then, these candidates are refined using a game-theoretic strategy based on Shapley value estimation to attribute precise semantic contributions. Our method requires no direct access to the target model and relies solely on a shadow model, making it broadly applicable. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AudioStealer recovers prompts with high textual consistency to the ground truth, while the regenerated audio maintains strong perceptual similarity to the target recordings. These results expose critical vulnerabilities in the text-to-audio market ecosystem and underscore the urgent need for intellectual property protections in generative audio technologies."
}