看似无害的音频微调会严重破坏语音大模型的安全性。
Benign Fine-Tuning Breaks Safety Alignment in Audio LLMs

- 通过音色与语义双重距离筛选无害音频,发现微调后攻击成功率升至87.12%
- 音频安全漏洞主因是声学特征而非语义内容,且不同模型表现差异大
- 提出数据过滤与提示词防御,无需修改架构即可消除风险
先前研究显示,在文本和视觉模态中,对已对齐模型进行无害数据微调会导致安全性能下降,且表征空间中靠近有害内容的样本危害最大。然而现有分析基于单一嵌入空间,未区分输入属性的影响。音频具有更复杂的结构:即使话语完全无害,声音特征也可能使其在表征空间中邻近有害内容。本文首次系统研究语音大模型的无害微调安全性,评估了三种前沿模型,采用基于距离的过滤框架,通过外部参考编码器与模型内部编码器分解邻近性为语义、声学及混合轴。结果表明,微调使越狱成功率(JSR)从个位数升至最高87.12%。关键发现:主导脆弱性轴与音频/文本微调相对风险均依赖于模型架构——由编码器与投影器如何将音频映射至大模型输入空间决定。本文提出两种防御策略:训练数据过滤以最大化与有害嵌入的距离,以及推理时使用文本提示,均无需架构修改即可将JSR降至接近零。对两个架构的机制分析显示,微调选择性抑制了晚期拒绝电路,而冻结编码器保留原始表示,且抑制模式也因架构而异,体现跨模态行为不对称性。无害微调带来的安全退化在语音大模型中是本质不同的风险。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Prior work shows that fine-tuning aligned models on benign data degrades safety in text and vision modalities, and that proximity to harmful content in representation space predicts which samples cause the most damage. However, existing analyses operate within a single, undifferentiated embedding space -- leaving open whether distinct input properties drive the vulnerability differently. Audio introduces a structurally richer problem: a benign sample can neighbor harmful content not only through what is said but through how it sounds, even when its words are entirely innocuous. We present the first systematic study of benign fine-tuning safety in Audio LLMs, evaluating three state-of-the-art models with a proximity-based filtering framework that selects benign audio by embedding-space distance to harmful content. By decomposing proximity into semantic, acoustic, and mixed axes using external reference encoders alongside each model's own internal encoder, we show that benign fine-tuning elevates Jailbreak Success Rate (JSR) from single digits to as high as 87.12%. Crucially, the dominant vulnerability axis and the relative risk of audio versus text fine-tuning are both architecture-conditioned -- determined by how each model's encoder and projector transform audio into the LLM's input space. We propose two defenses: filtering training data to maximize distance from harmful embeddings, and a textual system prompt at inference, both reducing JSR to near-zero without architectural modification. Our mechanistic analysis on two architectures reveals that fine-tuning selectively suppresses the late-layer refusal circuit while the frozen encoder preserves representations, and that even the suppression pattern is architecture-conditioned, mirroring the behavioral asymmetries across modalities. Safety degradation from benign fine-tuning is a qualitatively distinct risk in Audio LLMs.
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