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Main Authors: Huang, Tiansheng, Shejwalkar, Virat, Chang, Oscar, Nasr, Milad, Liu, Ling
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09682
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author Huang, Tiansheng
Shejwalkar, Virat
Chang, Oscar
Nasr, Milad
Liu, Ling
author_facet Huang, Tiansheng
Shejwalkar, Virat
Chang, Oscar
Nasr, Milad
Liu, Ling
contents Instilling reasoning capabilities in large models (LMs) using reasoning training (RT) significantly improves LMs' performances. Thus Audio Reasoning Models (ARMs), i.e., audio LMs that can reason, are becoming increasingly popular. However, no work has studied the safety of ARMs against jailbreak attacks that aim to elicit harmful responses from target models. To this end, first, we show that standard RT with appropriate safety reasoning data can protect ARMs from vanilla audio jailbreaks, but cannot protect them against our proposed simple yet effective jailbreaks. We show that this is because of the significant representation drift between vanilla and advanced jailbreaks which forces the target ARMs to emit harmful responses. Based on this observation, we propose Rebellion, a robust RT that trains ARMs to be robust to the worst-case representation drift. All our results are on Qwen2-Audio; they demonstrate that Rebellion: 1) can protect against advanced audio jailbreaks without compromising performance on benign tasks, and 2) significantly improves accuracy-safety trade-off over standard RT method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09682
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rebellion: Noise-Robust Reasoning Training for Audio Reasoning Models
Huang, Tiansheng
Shejwalkar, Virat
Chang, Oscar
Nasr, Milad
Liu, Ling
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Instilling reasoning capabilities in large models (LMs) using reasoning training (RT) significantly improves LMs' performances. Thus Audio Reasoning Models (ARMs), i.e., audio LMs that can reason, are becoming increasingly popular. However, no work has studied the safety of ARMs against jailbreak attacks that aim to elicit harmful responses from target models. To this end, first, we show that standard RT with appropriate safety reasoning data can protect ARMs from vanilla audio jailbreaks, but cannot protect them against our proposed simple yet effective jailbreaks. We show that this is because of the significant representation drift between vanilla and advanced jailbreaks which forces the target ARMs to emit harmful responses. Based on this observation, we propose Rebellion, a robust RT that trains ARMs to be robust to the worst-case representation drift. All our results are on Qwen2-Audio; they demonstrate that Rebellion: 1) can protect against advanced audio jailbreaks without compromising performance on benign tasks, and 2) significantly improves accuracy-safety trade-off over standard RT method.
title Rebellion: Noise-Robust Reasoning Training for Audio Reasoning Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09682