attack arXiv Mar 30, 2026 · 9d ago
Jia-Kai Dong, Yu-Xiang Lin, Hung-Yi Lee · National Taiwan University · NTU Artificial Intelligence Center of Research Excellence
First systematic membership inference attack evaluation of audio language models, revealing cross-modal memorization from speaker-text binding
Membership Inference Attack audiomultimodalnlp
We present the first systematic Membership Inference Attack (MIA) evaluation of Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). As audio encodes non-semantic information, it induces severe train and test distribution shifts and can lead to spurious MIA performance. Using a multi-modal blind baseline based on textual, spectral, and prosodic features, we demonstrate that common speech datasets exhibit near-perfect train/test separability (AUC approximately 1.0) even without model inference, and the standard MIA scores strongly correlate with these blind acoustic artifacts (correlation greater than 0.7). Using this blind baseline, we identify that distribution-matched datasets enable reliable MIA evaluation without distribution shift confounds. We benchmark multiple MIA methods and conduct modality disentanglement experiments on these datasets. The results reveal that LALM memorization is cross-modal, arising only from binding a speaker's vocal identity with its text. These findings establish a principled standard for auditing LALMs beyond spurious correlations.
multimodal transformer llm National Taiwan University · NTU Artificial Intelligence Center of Research Excellence