Codec-Robust Attacks on Audio LLMs
A new study introduces CodecAttack, an advanced method for attacking Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs). This technique optimizes perturbations in a neural audio codec's latent space, demonstrating significant success rates against various codecs. The findings indicate that lossy compression is not an effective defense against adversarial audio attacks.
- ▪CodecAttack achieves an average 85.5% target-substring attack success rate on Opus at moderate bitrates.
- ▪The attack transfers to held-out codecs, reaching up to 100% success on MP3 and 84% on AAC-LC without retraining.
- ▪The latent perturbation concentrates below 4kHz, where codecs allocate the most bits, while traditional waveform attacks spread into higher frequencies.
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Computer Science > Sound arXiv:2605.20519 (cs) [Submitted on 19 May 2026] Title:Codec-Robust Attacks on Audio LLMs Authors:Jaechul Roh, Jean-Philippe Monteuuis, Jonathan Petit, Amir Houmansdar View a PDF of the paper titled Codec-Robust Attacks on Audio LLMs, by Jaechul Roh and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Prior attacks on Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) demonstrated that carefully crafted waveform-domain perturbations can force targeted adversarial outputs. As a defense mechanism against these attacks, real-world codec compression preprocessing has been studied to both detect and remove the perturbations. Yet no existing attack has demonstrated robustness against these compressions.
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