Shenyi Zhang

Zheng Fang, Xiaosen Wang, Shenyi Zhang et al.

Jailbreak attacks on audio language models (ALMs) optimize audio perturbations to elicit unsafe generations, and they typically update the entire waveform densely throughout optimization. In this work, we investigate the necessity of such dense optimization by analyzing the structure of token-aligned gradients in ALMs. We find that gradient energy is highly non-uniform across audio tokens, indicating that only a small subset of token-aligned audio regions dominates the optimization signal. Motivated by this observation, we propose Token-Aware Gradient Optimization (TAGO), which enables sparse jailbreak optimization by retaining only waveform gradients aligned with audio tokens that have high gradient energy, while masking the remaining gradients at each iteration. Across three ALMs, TAGO outperforms baselines, and substantial sparsification preserves strong attack success rates (e.g. on Qwen3-Omni, $\mathrm{ASR}_{l}$ remains at 86% with a token retention ratio of 0.25, compared to 87% with full token retention). These results demonstrate that dense waveform updates are largely redundant, and we advocate that future audio jailbreak and safety alignment research should further leverage this heterogeneous token-level gradient structure.

Baolin Zheng, Peipei Jiang, Qian Wang et al.

Adversarial attacks against commercial black-box speech platforms, including cloud speech APIs and voice control devices, have received little attention until recent years. The current "black-box" attacks all heavily rely on the knowledge of prediction/confidence scores to craft effective adversarial examples, which can be intuitively defended by service providers without returning these messages. In this paper, we propose two novel adversarial attacks in more practical and rigorous scenarios. For commercial cloud speech APIs, we propose Occam, a decision-only black-box adversarial attack, where only final decisions are available to the adversary. In Occam, we formulate the decision-only AE generation as a discontinuous large-scale global optimization problem, and solve it by adaptively decomposing this complicated problem into a set of sub-problems and cooperatively optimizing each one. Our Occam is a one-size-fits-all approach, which achieves 100% success rates of attacks with an average SNR of 14.23dB, on a wide range of popular speech and speaker recognition APIs, including Google, Alibaba, Microsoft, Tencent, iFlytek, and Jingdong, outperforming the state-of-the-art black-box attacks. For commercial voice control devices, we propose NI-Occam, the first non-interactive physical adversarial attack, where the adversary does not need to query the oracle and has no access to its internal information and training data. We combine adversarial attacks with model inversion attacks, and thus generate the physically-effective audio AEs with high transferability without any interaction with target devices. Our experimental results show that NI-Occam can successfully fool Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, iFlytek and Amazon Echo with an average SRoA of 52% and SNR of 9.65dB, shedding light on non-interactive physical attacks against voice control devices.