Shilinlu Yan

Yuanhe Zhang, Jiayu Tian, Yibo Zhang et al.

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have been widely applied in real-time scenarios, such as in-car assistants and online meeting comprehension. In practice, audio inputs are often corrupted by device and environmental noise, leading to performance degradation. However, existing LALM studies on noise lack quantitative analysis and rely mainly on intuition and empirical observation, thus failing to understand practical robustness. To address this issue, we introduce Signal Embedding Energy (SEE), a method for quantifying the impact of noise intensity on LALM inputs, enabling the differentiation of LALM robustness in real-world deployments. SEE introduces a perspective based on structured activation subspaces derived from the model's internal representations, which more accurately captures its perception of noise than raw audio features. Across experiments, SEE exhibits a strong correlation with LALM performance, achieving a correlation of 0.98. Surprisingly, traditional audio denoising methods are only marginally effective for LALMs, and, in some cases, even increase SEE and impair performance. This suggests a mismatch between speech-centric denoising objectives and the noise sensitivity of modern LALMs. Therefore, we propose a mitigation strategy derived from SEE to denoise LALM inputs, outperforming existing denoising methods. This paper introduces a novel metric for noise quantification in LALMs, providing guidance for robustness improvements in real-world deployments.

Zhenhong Zhou, Shilinlu Yan, Chuanpu Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in cost-sensitive and on-device scenarios, and safety guardrails have advanced mainly in English. However, real-world Chinese malicious queries typically conceal intent via homophones, pinyin, symbol-based splitting, and other Chinese-specific patterns. These Chinese-specific adversarial patterns create the safety evaluation gap that is not well captured by existing benchmarks focused on English. This gap is particularly concerning for lightweight models, which may be more vulnerable to such specific adversarial perturbations. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Chinese-Specific Safety Benchmark (CSSBench) that emphasizes these adversarial patterns and evaluates the safety of lightweight LLMs in Chinese. Our benchmark covers six domains that are common in real Chinese scenarios, including illegal activities and compliance, privacy leakage, health and medical misinformation, fraud and hate, adult content, and public and political safety, and organizes queries into multiple task types. We evaluate a set of popular lightweight LLMs and measure over-refusal behavior to assess safety-induced performance degradation. Our results show that the Chinese-specific adversarial pattern is a critical challenge for lightweight LLMs. This benchmark offers a comprehensive evaluation of LLM safety in Chinese, assisting robust deployments in practice.

Yibo Zhang, Liang Lin, Kaiwen Luo et al.

While Audio Large Models (ALMs) 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 \textbf{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 \textit{Pasture}, \textit{Extreme Weather}, \textit{Classroom}, and \textit{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: \textbf{(I) The Perception-Cognition Gap:} Models maintain relative resilience in low-level recognition but suffer a \textbf{functional collapse} in high-order reasoning tasks under stress; \textbf{(II) Scenario Sensitivity:} ``Vocal-like'' interference (e.g., background laughter) proves significantly more destructive than mechanical noise, challenging the model's auditory attention mechanisms; and \textbf{(III) The Denoising Paradox:} Standard speech enhancement often exacerbates performance degradation, as ALLMs prove highly sensitive to the semantic distortions introduced by denoising artifacts.