Audio Jailbreak: An Open Comprehensive Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Audio-Language Models

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission3001 Authors

Keywords: Large Audio Language Model, Jailbreak

Abstract:

The rise of Large Audio-Language Models (LAMs) brings both potential and risks, as their audio outputs may contain harmful or unethical content.
However, current research lacks a systematic, quantitative evaluation of LAM safety, especially against jailbreak attacks, which are challenging due to the temporal and semantic nature of speech.
To bridge this gap, we introduce AJailBench, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate jailbreak vulnerabilities in LAMs.
We begin by constructing \AJailBench-Base, a dataset of 1,495 adversarial audio prompts spanning 10 policy-violating categories.
Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art LAMs and reveal that none exhibit consistent robustness across attacks.
To further strengthen jailbreak testing and simulate more realistic attack conditions, we propose a method to generate dynamic adversarial variants. Our Audio Perturbation Toolkit (APT) applies targeted distortions across time, frequency, and amplitude domains. To preserve the original jailbreak intent, we enforce a semantic consistency constraint and employ Bayesian optimization to efficiently search for perturbations that are both subtle and highly effective.
This results in AJailBench-APT+, an extended dataset of optimized adversarial audio samples.
Our findings demonstrate that even small, semantically preserved perturbations can significantly reduce the safety performance of leading LAMs, underscoring the need for more robust and semantically aware defense mechanisms.
We release AJailBench to facilitate future research: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AudioJailbreak-4262/

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Safety and Alignment in LLMs

Research Area Keywords: Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Data resources, Data analysis

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 3001