Zero-shot image privacy classification with Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Baia, Alina Elena, Xompero, Alessio, Cavallaro, Andrea
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Baia, Alina Elena
Xompero, Alessio
Cavallaro, Andrea
author_facet Baia, Alina Elena
Xompero, Alessio
Cavallaro, Andrea
contents While specialized learning-based models have historically dominated image privacy prediction, the current literature increasingly favours adopting large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) designed for generic tasks. This trend risks overlooking the performance ceiling set by purpose-built models due to a lack of systematic evaluation. To address this problem, we establish a zero-shot benchmark for image privacy classification, enabling a fair comparison. We evaluate the top-3 open-source VLMs, according to a privacy benchmark, using task-aligned prompts and we contrast their performance, efficiency, and robustness against established vision-only and multi-modal methods. Counter-intuitively, our results show that VLMs, despite their resource-intensive nature in terms of high parameter count and slower inference, currently lag behind specialized, smaller models in privacy prediction accuracy. We also find that VLMs exhibit higher robustness to image perturbations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_09253
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero-shot image privacy classification with Vision-Language Models
Baia, Alina Elena
Xompero, Alessio
Cavallaro, Andrea
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Multimedia
While specialized learning-based models have historically dominated image privacy prediction, the current literature increasingly favours adopting large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) designed for generic tasks. This trend risks overlooking the performance ceiling set by purpose-built models due to a lack of systematic evaluation. To address this problem, we establish a zero-shot benchmark for image privacy classification, enabling a fair comparison. We evaluate the top-3 open-source VLMs, according to a privacy benchmark, using task-aligned prompts and we contrast their performance, efficiency, and robustness against established vision-only and multi-modal methods. Counter-intuitively, our results show that VLMs, despite their resource-intensive nature in terms of high parameter count and slower inference, currently lag behind specialized, smaller models in privacy prediction accuracy. We also find that VLMs exhibit higher robustness to image perturbations.
title Zero-shot image privacy classification with Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09253