Gaussian splats leak faces and documents, and one framework anonymises them after training in under a second
AspireAI community · arXiv (2610.36168)
3D Gaussian Splatting captures high-fidelity scenes well, but the learned representation encodes whatever was in front of the camera - faces, licence plates, documents, computer screens - and those splats get shared and deployed. PrinGS anonymises a trained splat at the representation level: given a trained model and a reference view identifying sensitive content, it localises the corresponding regions inside the 3D representation and alters them directly, so the sensitive information is absent from every subsequently rendered view rather than merely blurred in one camera angle. The authors report completing this post-training anonymisation in less than one second, and adding a privacy-by-design training strategy that prevents sensitive content from being embedded during optimisation in the first place. Their headline figures are a Face Similarity Measure of 9.79 percent at a retained Face Detection Rate of 39.47 percent, with an OCR Character Error Rate of 1.00 making sensitive text completely unreadable. The limitation is the trade-off itself - retention at 39 percent means real content is also lost.
Read the story and explore more from the AspireAI community.
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.