Lun Wang
2026
Attacker’s Noise Can Manipulate Your Audio-based LLM in the Real World
Vinu Sankar Sadasivan | Soheil Feizi | Rajiv Mathews | Lun Wang
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Vinu Sankar Sadasivan | Soheil Feizi | Rajiv Mathews | Lun Wang
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
This paper investigates the real-world vulnerabilities of audio-based large language models (ALLMs), such as Qwen2-Audio. We first demonstrate that an adversary can craft stealthy audio perturbations to manipulate ALLMs into exhibiting specific targeted behaviors, such as eliciting responses to wake-keywords (e.g., "Hey Qwen"), or triggering harmful behaviors (e.g., "Change my calendar event"). Subsequently, we show that playing adversarial background noise during user interaction with the ALLMs can significantly degrade the response quality. Crucially, our research illustrates the scalability of these attacks to real-world scenarios, impacting other innocent users when these adversarial noises are played through the air. Further, we discuss the transferability of the attack and potential defensive measures.