arXiv AI

Defending Wearable VLMs Against Private Attribute Inference

arXiv AI
4d ago

Guided Zero-Shot Anomaly Explanation for Anonymized Crowd Video Monitoring: Context, Categorization, and Spatial Localization

The paper introduces XAVAD, a unified approach for explainable anomaly detection in anonymized crowd video monitoring. It combines zero‑shot anonymization, anomaly type categorization, spatial localization, and scene context description using multimodal CLIP embeddings, LLM‑assisted prompting, and a prompt‑guided patching autofocus mechanism. Experiments on public CCTV datasets show XAVAD outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods and offers insights into privacy‑explainability trade‑offs.

By Mulugeta Weldezgina Asres, Lei Jiao, Christian Walter Omlin
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

On the Robustness of Vision-Language Models in Zero-shot Privacy Classification

The paper investigates whether large, instruction‑following Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) can reliably perform zero‑shot image privacy classification. It compares three open‑source VLMs to specialized privacy models on two public benchmarks, evaluating accuracy, robustness to image degradations (compression, lighting changes, noise), inference speed, and parameter count. The findings show that while VLMs remain robust to perturbations, they are less accurate and significantly slower than smaller, purpose‑built privacy models, indicating that scaling alone does not guarantee effective privacy classification.

By Alina Elena Baia, Alessio Xompero, Andrea Cavallaro
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

HeteroPROMPT: A Real-time and Privacy-Preserving Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception Framework

HeteroPROMPT is a real‑time, privacy‑preserving framework for heterogeneous collaborative perception in autonomous systems. It aligns features from diverse sensors and models into a unified ego‑centric space using modular prompts and lightweight tuning, while keeping encoders and fusion stacks frozen. The system employs a metadata‑free autoencoder for modality classification and routing, achieving higher average precision on OPV2V‑H and V2XSet datasets with far fewer trainable parameters.

By Armin Maleki, Hayder Radha
arXiv AI
Oct 16

FedSumUp: User-Auditable Privacy-Aware Representation Sharing for Resource-Constrained Federated Intelligence

FedSumUp introduces a learnable lossy compressor that generates compact, visually interpretable representations on client devices, reducing privacy leakage and computational overhead. The compressor is trained on the server using a data‑free closed‑loop optimization that minimizes the difference between original and twice‑compressed representations after upsampling. Experiments on BloodMNIST, CIFAR‑10, and ChestMNIST show low reconstruction PSNR, significant client runtime reductions, and competitive classification accuracy while remaining robust to non‑IID data.

By Jingwei Zhao, Tiantong Sun, Yuanyuan Song, Jinhuan Guo, Wei Zishuo, Shengyu Huang, Ziyuan Ren, Wei Chen, Xiaojin Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Beyond Classification: Task-Dependent Learnability under Privacy-Motivated Image Transformations

The paper argues that evaluating privacy‑enhancing technologies (PETs) solely through image classification is insufficient because classification remains robust to many geometric and local perturbations. It proposes a compute‑aware multi‑task protocol that uses lightweight proxy tasks to assess PETs across various transformations, revealing that PETs with similar classification accuracy can perform very differently on other vision tasks. The study demonstrates the necessity of broader evaluation metrics beyond classification to truly gauge PET effectiveness.

By Leon Ranke, Wolfgang H\"ubner, Ronny Hug, Michael Arens, J\"urgen Beyerer
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

When T2I Synthetic Data Backfires: Amplified Privacy Risks in Real-Synthetic Mix Training

arXiv:2607. 13541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To overcome data scarcity and privacy constraints in data collection, it has become standard practice across academia and industry to augment real training data with text-to-image (T2I)-generated synthetic data, a paradigm we term Real-Synthetic Mix-Training (RSMT).

By Na Li, Boyu Kuang, Hongsheng Hu, Liquan Chen, Hyoungshick Kim, Yansong Gao, Anmin Fu