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This research addresses critical security vulnerabilities in full-duplex speech-to-speech models by introducing PALS, a defense mechanism that leverages psychoacoustic masking to neutralize imperceptible adversarial attacks. By injecting anisotropic noise at the latent interface without inference-time overhead, the method significantly reduces risks of semantic hijacking and policy jailbreaking while maintaining audio fidelity. The study provides a robust framework for securing real-time conversational AI systems against sophisticated acoustic manipulations.
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Psychoacoustically Aligned Latent Smoothing for Adversarial Robustness of Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech Dialogue Models

arXiv2 min read

arXiv:2609.27378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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 carrier speech, under three goals: targeted semantic hijacking, response suppression, and policy jailbreaking. Against an undefended Moshi-style agent, white-box attacks succeed in up to 91.7% of trials. We then introduce psychoacoustically aligned latent smoothing (PALS), which injects anisotropic Gaussian noise shaped by local codebook covariance at the residual-vector-quantized latent interface, with input noise shaped by the masking threshold constraining the attacker and trained by a Kullback--Leibler consistency objective. Deployed with no inference-time cost, PALS reduces hijack to 8.3%, mute to 11.2%, and jailbreak to 9.1% at clean quality within 2.3%. A Monte Carlo-smoothed variant certifies an ellipsoidal latent radius up to 0.616, a guaranteed floor that the empirical robustness far exceeds.

Abstract: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 carrier speech, under three goals: targeted semantic hijacking, response suppression, and policy jailbreaking. Against an undefended Moshi-style agent, white-box attacks succeed in up to 91.7% of trials. We then introduce psychoacoustically aligned latent smoothing (PALS), which injects anisotropic Gaussian noise shaped by local codebook covariance at the residual-vector-quantized latent interface, with input noise shaped by the masking threshold constraining the attacker and trained by a Kullback--Leibler consistency objective. Deployed with no inference-time cost, PALS reduces hijack to 8.3%, mute to 11.2%, and jailbreak to 9.1% at clean quality within 2.3%. A Monte Carlo-smoothed variant certifies an ellipsoidal latent radius up to 0.616, a guaranteed floor that the empirical robustness far exceeds.

Sound (cs.SD); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

arXiv:2609.27378 [cs.SD]

(or arXiv:2609.27378v1 [cs.SD] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.27378 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 253 words

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