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Main Authors: Zhang, Shuning, Li, Zhaoxin, Wen, Changxi, Ma, Ying, Li, Simin, Zhang, Gengrui, Zhang, Ziyi, Meng, Yibo, Zhao, Hantao, Yi, Xin, Li, Hewu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02367
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author Zhang, Shuning
Li, Zhaoxin
Wen, Changxi
Ma, Ying
Li, Simin
Zhang, Gengrui
Zhang, Ziyi
Meng, Yibo
Zhao, Hantao
Yi, Xin
Li, Hewu
author_facet Zhang, Shuning
Li, Zhaoxin
Wen, Changxi
Ma, Ying
Li, Simin
Zhang, Gengrui
Zhang, Ziyi
Meng, Yibo
Zhao, Hantao
Yi, Xin
Li, Hewu
contents The proliferation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) introduces profound privacy risks from personal videos. This paper addresses the critical yet unexplored inferential privacy threat, the risk of inferring sensitive personal attributes over the data. To address this gap, we crowdsourced a dataset of 508 everyday personal videos from 58 individuals. We then conducted a benchmark study evaluating VLM inference capabilities against human performance. Our findings reveal three critical insights: (1) VLMs possess superhuman inferential capabilities, significantly outperforming human evaluators, leveraging a shift from object recognition to behavioral inference from temporal streams. (2) Inferential risk is strongly correlated with factors such as video characteristics and prompting strategies. (3) VLM-driven explanation towards the inference is unreliable, as we revealed a disconnect between the model-generated explanations and evidential impact, identifying ubiquitous objects as misleading confounders.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_02367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Pervasive Blind Spot: Benchmarking VLM Inference Risks on Everyday Personal Videos
Zhang, Shuning
Li, Zhaoxin
Wen, Changxi
Ma, Ying
Li, Simin
Zhang, Gengrui
Zhang, Ziyi
Meng, Yibo
Zhao, Hantao
Yi, Xin
Li, Hewu
Human-Computer Interaction
The proliferation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) introduces profound privacy risks from personal videos. This paper addresses the critical yet unexplored inferential privacy threat, the risk of inferring sensitive personal attributes over the data. To address this gap, we crowdsourced a dataset of 508 everyday personal videos from 58 individuals. We then conducted a benchmark study evaluating VLM inference capabilities against human performance. Our findings reveal three critical insights: (1) VLMs possess superhuman inferential capabilities, significantly outperforming human evaluators, leveraging a shift from object recognition to behavioral inference from temporal streams. (2) Inferential risk is strongly correlated with factors such as video characteristics and prompting strategies. (3) VLM-driven explanation towards the inference is unreliable, as we revealed a disconnect between the model-generated explanations and evidential impact, identifying ubiquitous objects as misleading confounders.
title The Pervasive Blind Spot: Benchmarking VLM Inference Risks on Everyday Personal Videos
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02367