arXiv AI

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.

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
3d ago

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 Computer Vision
Aug 24

Privacy-Preserving Object Detection for Vision Transformer-Based Models

The paper introduces a new object detection approach that protects sensitive visual data in test images. It is the first to apply perceptual encryption to object detection, leveraging the embedding structure of Vision Transformers and a key-based domain adaptation to maintain accuracy comparable to unprotected models. Experiments on ViTdet confirm the method’s effectiveness in both accuracy and visual protection.

By Homare Sueyoshi, Kiyoshi Nishikawa, Hitoshi Kiya
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Pushing the (Decision) Boundaries: Dynamically Calibrating Differentially Private Noise to Explainability in Federated Learning

The paper introduces XCal-FL, a federated learning algorithm that dynamically calibrates differential privacy noise using three signals—prediction logit variations, counterfactual margins, and saliency concentration—to improve both predictive accuracy and explanation fidelity. Experiments on medical imaging datasets demonstrate that XCal-FL outperforms static-noise and state‑of‑the‑art adaptive DP methods, achieving over 10% better accuracy and up to fivefold higher explanation fidelity while using privacy budgets more efficiently. The study highlights that explanation fidelity behaves non‑linearly with privacy loss, indicating that explainability is a separate dimension of the privacy trade‑off.

By Michael Khavkin, Kichang Lee, Jaeho Jin, JeongGil Ko, Eran Toch