Hiding in Plain Sight: A Diffusion-based Mitigation of Geolocation Privacy Leakage in Vision-Language Models
Multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex visual understanding. However, this very power introduces a critical yet underexplored privacy threat: adversaries can exploit MLRMs to precisely infer users' geographic locations from casually shared photographs, by performing structured reasoning over subtle visual cues such as architectural styles, vegetation, and lighting conditions. In this work, we present a systematic study of MLRM-driven geolocation privacy leakage. We first reveal that refusal-based safeguards are critically insufficient, as carefully crafted jailbreak prompts can raise model response rates to 100%. We further identify ...
| Authors | Yining Wang, Xi Li, Mi Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 18 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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