SpeechLLMs used in professional settings often undergo domain customisation through prompts or fine‑tuning, which can inadvertently cause the model to transcribe phonetically similar words from its context or training data, leaking private information. The authors systematically investigate this overlooked privacy risk, creating benchmarks to measure leakage rates for both prompting and fine‑tuning, and find that both mechanisms cause measurable leakage that compounds when combined. They evaluate a prompt‑level mitigation strategy and analyse the accuracy‑leakage trade‑off, concluding that fine‑tuning without context prompts offers the best balance between performance and privacy.
By Maike Z\"ufle, Jan Niehues
The paper introduces a two‑stage speech anonymization framework that preserves both linguistic content and acoustic identity. It replaces personally identifiable information using a generative editing model and applies a flow‑matching anonymization technique (F3‑VA) to create diverse, distinct anonymized speakers. The authors evaluate privacy with speaker verification metrics and utility by training ASR, TTS, and SER models from scratch, showing stronger privacy protection with minimal utility loss compared to existing baselines.
By Yunchong Xiao, Yuxiang Zhao, Ziyang Ma, Shuai Wang, Kai Yu, Jiachun Liao, Xie Chen
arXiv:2601. 04641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The deployment of Machine-Generated Text (MGT) detection systems necessitates processing sensitive user data, creating a fundamental conflict between authorship verification and privacy preservation.
By Lionel Z. Wang, Yusheng Zhao, Jiabin Luo, Xinfeng Li, Lixu Wang, Yinan Peng, Haoyang Li, XiaoFeng Wang, Wei Dong
The paper investigates how acoustic and content-oriented speaker verification attacks perform against multilingual voice anonymization. It evaluates both attacker types on anonymized speech, builds a multilingual voice-converted dataset to enhance cross‑lingual generalization, and finds that attack success depends on how much linguistic utility is preserved. Acoustic‑oriented attacks generally outperform content‑oriented ones, but the performance gap narrows when linguistic information is well maintained, and the new dataset improves results while reducing cross‑lingual disparities.
By Ridwan Arefeen, Ze Li, Rong Tong, Ming Li, Xiaoxiao Miao
The paper introduces VoxPrivacy, a benchmark for assessing interactional privacy in Speech Language Models (SLMs). It evaluates models on a 32‑hour bilingual dataset across three difficulty tiers, revealing that most open‑source SLMs perform near random on conditional privacy decisions and even strong closed‑source systems struggle with proactive privacy inference. The authors also validate these findings on a real‑speech subset and show that fine‑tuning on a 4,000‑hour training set can improve privacy‑preserving capabilities while maintaining robustness.
By Yuxiang Wang, Hongyu Liu, Dekun Chen, Xueyao Zhang, Zhizheng Wu
Conformal Privacy Auditing (CPA) is a distribution‑free framework that calibrates re‑identification risk for each released document against large language model (LLM)‑empowered adversaries. It outputs a conformal ambiguity set of candidate identities that is guaranteed to contain the true identity with a user‑chosen confidence level under exchangeability, along with an interpretable leakage proxy derived from the set size. CPA supports both logit‑access and sampling‑only attackers, enabling audits of both open‑source and proprietary models, and demonstrates calibrated coverage across various benchmarks and attacker configurations.
By Shuo Huang, Gholamreza Haffari, Xingliang Yuan, Ting Yu, Lizhen Qu
arXiv:2609.13195v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have recently shown strong capabilities in speech understanding and question answering (QA), but they also inherit...
By Zhe Liu
The paper introduces Whiteout, a tool that prevents large language models from revealing personally sensitive information (PSI) by overwriting such data with carefully crafted obfuscation samples. Whiteout is evaluated on various LLMs, including an OpenAI model, and shows effective PSI protection with minimal impact on model utility and safety. The study also tests Whiteout against multiple attack vectors and discusses its security and ethical implications.
By Anna Yoo Jeong Ha, Ronik Bhaskar, Haitao Zheng, Ben Y. Zhao
arXiv:2606. 24623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation enhances large language models by incorporating external knowledge, but deploying it in sensitive scenarios risks privacy leakage via malicious prompts.
By Yuanhe Zhao, Tianyu Zhang, Huafei Xing, Derek F. Wong, Jianbin Li, Tao Fang
The paper introduces a black-box membership inference attack framework tailored for fine-tuned text-to-speech models, addressing challenges in query generation and representation engineering. It evaluates five query types, finding recitation queries most effective, and uses multi-level speech embeddings with temporal alignment for fine-grained comparison. Experiments on CosyVoice2, F5-TTS, and XTTS-v2 trained on VCTK and British Dialect datasets show high privacy leakage, with speaker-level AUC above 0.80 and record-level AUC between 0.80 and 0.90.
By Kunlin Cai, Kaiyuan Zhang, Zihang Xiang, Jinghuai Zhang, Abeer Alwan, Fnu Suya, Yuan Tian
The paper systematically studies how anonymizing input data affects large language models (LLMs). Five prominent LLMs were evaluated on eleven benchmarks, comparing performance on original versus pseudonymized inputs. Results show that anonymization generally degrades performance, with larger drops for more capable models and task-dependent effects; reversible anonymization preserves entity uniqueness better than irreversible redaction, and prompting about anonymization offers no benefit.
By Tobias Deu{\ss}er, Max Hahnb\"uck, Lorenz Sparrenberg, Tobias Uelwer, Christian Bauckhage, Rafet Sifa
arXiv:2606. 29897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice anonymization aims to protect speaker identity while preserving linguistic content and speech usability.
By Pranav Tushar, Xiao Xiao Miao, Rong Tong