Yitian Chen


2026

While Audio Large Models (ALLMs) have achieved remarkable proficiency, their robustness remains brittle in real-world deployment. Existing evaluations largely rely on synthetic Gaussian noise or simplistic single-source interference, failing to capture the intricate, multi-layered acoustic dynamics—or "Acoustic Ecology"—that characterize authentic physical environments. To bridge this ecological gap, we introduce RSA-Bench, a comprehensive robustness benchmark designed to stress-test ALLMs through high-fidelity auditory scene simulations. Unlike traditional methods, we construct evaluation samples by naturally superimposing diverse environmental soundscapes—spanning Pasture, Extreme Weather, Classroom, and Outdoors—onto clean speech signals across a spectrum of interference intensities. By evaluating models on six core tasks ranging from fundamental perception to complex reasoning, our study unveils three macro-level insights: (I) The Perception-Cognition Gap: Models maintain relative resilience in low-level recognition but suffer a functional collapse in high-order reasoning tasks under stress; (II) Scenario Sensitivity: "Vocal-like" interference (e.g., children playing) proves significantly more destructive than mechanical noise, challenging the model’s auditory attention mechanisms; and (III) The Denoising Paradox: Standard speech enhancement often exacerbates performance degradation, as ALLMs prove highly sensitive to the semantic distortions introduced by denoising artifacts.
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 HearSay, 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 HearSay 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/HearSay_Benchmark