arXiv Computer Vision

EXPL-FR: Explaining Face Recognition Models via Vision-Language Alignment

EXPL-FR is a lightweight adapter that aligns a vision‑language model’s image encoder with a frozen face‑recognition (FR) embedding space, enabling the FR model to be explained using semantic attribute prompts without any text training. By mapping 978 attribute prompts across 22 categories into the FR space, the method identifies the most detectable concepts—forming a readable semantic signature that better separates identities than the full vocabulary. The approach is evaluated on four FR backbones and two VLM encoders, providing identity‑level, per‑image, and differential explanations, and demonstrates that prompt‑driven audits can rank FR models by per‑ethnicity error and attribute‑change verification cost without requiring labeled data.

arXiv AI
Sep 21

Benchmarking the Explanatory Quality of Open-Weight Vision-Language Models in Face Recognition

The paper introduces a benchmarking framework that evaluates open-weight Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) for face recognition by treating explanation quality as a core metric. It defines two key criteria for explanations—relevance, meaning reliance on identity‑stable facial features, and faithfulness, meaning alignment with the visible image content without hallucinations. Using this framework, the authors benchmark several VLM families, jointly assessing face verification accuracy and explanation quality, and find that current models still exhibit shortcomings in their explanations, underscoring the importance of explanation metrics for a complete performance assessment.

By Laurent Colbois, S\'ebastien Marcel
arXiv AI
Jun 4

CounterFace: A Synthetic Face Dataset for Fine-Grained Counterfactual Evaluation of Face Recognition Systems

arXiv:2407. 13922v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Face recognition (FR) systems are widely deployed in critical applications, making their reliability and robustness across diverse populations and conditions essential.

By Guruprasad Viswanathan Ramesh, Ashish Hooda, Shimaa Ahmed, Harrison J Rosenberg, Ramya Korlakai Vinayak, Kassem Fawaz
arXiv AI
Sep 18

FORGE: Forensic Reasoning with Grounded Evidence

FORGE is a forensic deepfake analysis system that provides region‑grounded natural language explanations for image manipulations. It addresses the inductive bias mismatch of multimodal large language models by adding a Vision‑Only Model trained on dense patch prediction, allowing the language model to interleave tokens with preserved spatial correspondence. Across face‑manipulated and fully synthetic content, FORGE delivers fine‑grained attribute queries and outperforms in‑domain baselines, with region‑specific evaluation and human studies confirming explanation faithfulness.

By Rohit Kundu, Shan Jia, Vishal Mohanty, Athula Balachandran, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Beyond Scalar Distances: Semantic Attribute Gradients from Frozen MLLMs for Visual Embeddings

arXiv:2606. 15134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched.

By Shubhang Bhatnagar, Dheeraj Baiju, Narendra Ahuja
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Free the Language Model From the Vision Encoder: Semantic Serialization as a Perception Interface for Small Language Models

The paper introduces a perception interface that separates vision from language in vision‑language models. A frozen perception stack detects objects, a deterministic semantic serializer converts the perceived state into text, and a standard text‑only large language model (LLM) answers questions. Experiments on a campus‑robot benchmark show that this serialized interface outperforms a zero‑shot VLM of the same language‑model size, especially as the language model shrinks, and that the advantage persists under paraphrase and different supervision regimes.

By Cong Xu, Ravi Sankar
arXiv AI
Jun 24

Evaluating the Interpretability of Sparse Autoencoders with Concept Annotations

arXiv:2606. 24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence.

By Jonas Klotz, Cassio F. Dantas, Pallavi Jain, Diego Marcos, Beg\"um Demir