Skip to content

Hearing the Unspoken: Language Model Priors for Acoustic Adversarial Attacks

Jun 2026 · arXiv.org · Vol abs/2606.06833 · 0 citations · 36 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

This new Semantic Gambit attack overcomes this causal limitation by augmenting the adversary with predictive context derived from a Large Language Model in real-time by augmenting the adversary with predictive context derived from a Large Language Model in real-time.

Abstract

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems operating in real-time settings must process acoustic input under strict temporal constraints, where transcription decisions are inherently made on incomplete information. This causal constraint serves as an information bottleneck on attackers, significantly limiting attack performance. Our new Semantic Gambit attack overcomes this causal limitation by augmenting the adversary with predictive context derived from a Large Language Model in real-time. Our experiments show that this form of augmentation can elevate the corpus-level Word Error Rate to 35.6%-a three-fold increase over the current state-of-the-art streaming attack. Ultimately, this work reveals how common, low-latency LLM tooling can be exploited to systematically subvert real-time ASR pipelines.

View source

Similar papers

Preprint Sep 2026

Domain-Incremental Learning for Multi-Channel Replay Speech Detection

This work frames this as Domain-Incremental Learning over acoustic environments and presents the first continual learning benchmark for multi-channel replay speech detection, evaluating a state-of-the-art beamformer-based detector over all 24 environment orderings of the ReMASC corpus with five seeds.

Michael Neri · 0 citations
Open access Oct 2026

Defending against deepfake speech attacks via feature dropout and dropin regularization in large audio language models

Deepfakes have raised widespread concern owing to their threats to privacy, security, and societal trust, driving growing research interest in effective detection methods. Audio deepfake detection has moved from handcrafted-feature classifiers to end-to-end deep learning architectures and, more recently, to self-superv...

Yu-Pei Li, Yi-Xiong Fang, Jia-Hao Xue et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Sep 2026

GhostWord: A Fine-Grained Backdoor Attack on Automatic Speech Recognition

During poisoning, a trigger is injected into the forced-aligned time span of a chosen source word in the audio and replace only that word in the transcript, enabling precise semantic flips and composable sentence manipulation while avoiding many-to-one label artifacts.

Mojtaba Nafez, Mobina Poulaei, Kiarash Kiani Feriz et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Psychoacoustically Aligned Latent Smoothing for Adversarial Robustness of Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech Dialogue Models

End-to-end speech-to-speech dialogue models listen and speak simultaneously, so a continuously open acoustic channel is exposed to adversarial manipulation. We formalize imperceptible attacks on full-duplex agents as optimization over additive perturbations confined beneath the psychoacoustic masking threshold of the c...

Kian Shamsaie, Iman Modarressi · 0 citations
Preprint Oct 2026

Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models to Input Sequence Variations

A generative robustness metric based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence between per-step output distributions under small input perturbations is proposed, R_stab(f), which attests tool calls with HMAC-protected packets at under 0.1 ms per call, and the Commit Boundary isolation pattern.

N. Maloyan · 0 citations

Related blog posts

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Sep 29, 2026

Who we become when we talk to machines

Professor Sherry Turkle’s new book, “Artificial Intimacy,” offers a withering critique of chatbots and the antisocial dynamics she believes they encourage.

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.