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
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
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:2608.28691v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Wearable VLM pipelines promise continuous multimodal assistance from egocentric visual capture: a user asks a task-driven question about the surround...
By Zhimin Li, Pan Wang, Jingxian Chen, Yuantao Tang, Anthony Chen, Qian Lou, Jingtong Hu
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:2606. 09132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual Language Models (VLMs) have gained significant popularity due to their remarkable ability.
By Tiejin Chen, Pingzhi Li, Kaixiong Zhou, Tianlong Chen, Hua Wei