CVAIJun 11, 2025

Inverting Black-Box Face Recognition Systems via Zero-Order Optimization in Eigenface Space

arXiv:2506.09777v1h-index: 11Has Code
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

This addresses privacy threats by enabling model inversion in more challenging scenarios, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for black-box attacks.

The paper tackled the problem of reconstructing facial images from black-box recognition models using only similarity scores, and DarkerBB achieved state-of-the-art verification accuracies on benchmarks like LFW, AgeDB-30, and CFP-FP.

Reconstructing facial images from black-box recognition models poses a significant privacy threat. While many methods require access to embeddings, we address the more challenging scenario of model inversion using only similarity scores. This paper introduces DarkerBB, a novel approach that reconstructs color faces by performing zero-order optimization within a PCA-derived eigenface space. Despite this highly limited information, experiments on LFW, AgeDB-30, and CFP-FP benchmarks demonstrate that DarkerBB achieves state-of-the-art verification accuracies in the similarity-only setting, with competitive query efficiency.

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The foundational work for this paper's niche, ranked by how specifically the neighbourhood builds on it — not by global fame.

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