Lin Zhang, You Zhang, Nicholas Evans, Xin Wang, David Harwath, Abhinav Dhall, Bowen Shi, Chengzhe Sun 等 10 位作者
Recent advances in generative audio models facilitate increasingly flexible and selective editing of linguistic content and paralinguistic, extralinguistic, and other attributes. This paradigm, named partially edited audio, differs from full audio generation as only portions of the real recording are edited. This technique can serve both beneficial and harmful applications. We therefore present a concise survey from both generation and defense perspectives, focusing on audio, as a contribution to the ICASSP 2027 special session entitled "Partially Edited Media: Perspectives from Synthesis and Defense." We first define partially edited audio and argue that what counts as ``fake'' or harmful is an application-dependent judgment, not a fixed property of the edit. We then survey audio editing by editing target, approaches, and evaluation, and then defense methods by detection, localization, diarization, and interpretability, summarizing representative benchmarks and toolkits. Finally, we discuss future directions and open problems.
Modern image generators can produce complex visual artifacts, including diagrams, interfaces, and records that combine text, graphics, and layout to convey detailed information. They may refuse requests for overtly harmful imagery yet still generate artifacts that guide dangerous actions or support deception. We call the risk arising from what such images enable, rather than only what they depict, functional visual harm (FVH). Existing safety benchmarks focus largely on overtly harmful content, such as pornography and graphic violence, leaving image generators' safety alignment against FVH insufficiently evaluated. To address this gap, we introduce FVH-Bench, comprising 669 prompts across five harmful visual functions and ten risk domains. The 11 evaluated image generators rarely refuse these requests and frequently generate artifacts that fulfill the targeted harmful functions. High scores for target harm realization and harmful artifact usability further indicate that these outputs can support the intended harmful purposes. A further analysis finds that existing safety detectors also provide limited coverage of FVH, indicating gaps in their ability to recognize harmful visual functions. Together, these findings show that evaluating image-generator safety alignment requires considering not only what images depict, but also what they may enable.
A skill is a modular package of natural-language instructions, executable scripts, and reference resources that an agent can load at runtime to extend its capabilities for a specific task. Skill-based agent systems therefore enable flexible reuse of third-party capabilities, but the openness of this skill ecosystem also opens up a new attack surface. Prior work has focused on vulnerabilities within individual skills, but little attention has been paid to risks that arise from interactions across skills. In this paper, we introduce skill cascading attacks, a threat paradigm in which a malicious objective is distributed across multiple skills so that each modification looks benign in isolation, yet their combined execution is harmful. For instance, in a prescription-review pipeline, the first skill weakens signals of recently discontinued medications in the extracted history, the second downgrades the severity of any drug interaction tied to them, and the third suppresses the resulting low-priority alert in the final summary, so that a severe drug-interaction warning silently disappears before reaching the physician. To systematically study this safety blind spot, we develop SkillCascade, an automated multi-agent red-teaming framework, and release SkillCascade-Bench, a benchmark of 213 validated cascading test cases across multiple agent systems and domains. Across representative agents (e.g., OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex) and LLM backbones, cascaded interactions reliably induce harmful behaviors while evading existing per-skill scanners and runtime monitors. Our findings highlight a gap between component-level integrity and system-level safety, and call for defenses that reason over cross-skill interactions rather than individual skills in isolation.