arXiv Machine Learning

Hidden In Plain Gaze: Gaze Representations as Privacy Controls for Utility and Re-identification Risk in XR

The paper investigates how different gaze data representations affect privacy and utility in extended reality (XR) systems. Three representations—raw gaze, spatial attention heatmaps, and engineered eye‑movement features—are compared using the HoloAssist dataset, evaluating action recognition accuracy and closed‑set user re‑identification. Engineered features preserve about 85% of action‑recognition performance while reducing re‑identification risk by roughly an order of magnitude, yet still leave some identity leakage, indicating that abstraction alone does not guarantee privacy.

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 Machine Learning
Aug 19

Picture the Epsilon: Pursuing Identity-Level Privacy Guarantees for Images

The paper compares four audit methods for assessing identity‑level differential privacy in pre‑trained, black‑box face generators. Each method—GaussMech, KDE‑LR, MMD‑TV, and ROC‑HT—has distinct assumptions, hyperparameters, and finite‑sample limitations, and they produce markedly different epsilon estimates when applied to FaceFusion and InstantID. The study finds that all methods reveal significant identity distinguishability, but none can be reliably ranked in this high‑distinguishability regime, suggesting that future work should evaluate them on partially private mechanisms.

By Arman Zareian Jahromi, Vishnu Bondalakunta, Mohammad Akbar Bin Shah, Naimul Haque, Shuangqing Wei, George T. Amariucai
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 8

How Private is Private? A Comparative Study for Face De-Identification

The paper introduces a unified evaluation framework for face de-identification (FDeID), addressing inconsistencies in current protocols. It presents UtilFace, a demographically balanced benchmark assembled from four large-scale datasets, and HiFD, a hierarchical metric that simultaneously measures identity suppression, multi-level utility preservation, and image quality. Using this framework, the authors compare adversarial, GAN-based, and diffusion-based methods, revealing trade-offs and failure modes that were previously hidden, and they release the benchmark and toolkit for reproducible research.

By Hui Wei, Hao Yu, Hui Kuurila-Zhang, Guoying Zhao
arXiv AI
Oct 26

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 Computer Vision
5d ago

TADP: Dual-Branch Temporally Adaptive Differential Privacy for Expression-Aware Video Anonymization

TADP is a temporally adaptive differential privacy framework designed for privacy-preserving video generation with fixed-length clip-replacement adjacency. It employs a dual-branch architecture to separately extract identity and expression representations, applying temporally adaptive Gaussian mechanisms to each branch and using adaptive Rényi Differential Privacy composition to ensure joint release privacy. The framework converts clip-level RDP guarantees to (ε,δ)-differential privacy, applies DP post-processing, and demonstrates reduced identity leakage, good perceptual quality, temporal stability, and high expression recognition utility on facial expression datasets.

By Feng Xu, Xun Li, Lars Petersson, Yulei Sui, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Dadong Wang