@inproceedings{wang-etal-2025-ai,
    title = "{AI} Knows Where You Are: Exposure, Bias, and Inference in Multimodal Geolocation with {K}orea{GEO}",
    author = "Wang, Xiaonan  and
      Shao, Bo  and
      Kim, Hansaem",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.501/",
    pages = "9897--9914",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled accurate image-based geolocation, raising serious concerns about location privacy risks in everyday social media posts. Yet, a systematic evaluation of such risks is still lacking: existing benchmarks show coarse granularity, linguistic bias, and a neglect of multimodal privacy risks. To address these gaps, we introduce KoreaGEO, the first fine-grained, multimodal, and privacy-aware benchmark for geolocation, built on Korean street views. The benchmark covers four socio-spatial clusters and nine place types with rich contextual annotations and two captioning styles that simulate real-world privacy exposure. To evaluate mainstream VLMs, we design a three-path protocol spanning image-only, functional-caption, and high-risk-caption inputs, enabling systematic analysis of localization accuracy, spatial bias, and reasoning behavior. Results show that input modality exerts a stronger influence on localization precision and privacy exposure than model scale or architecture, with high-risk captions substantially boosting accuracy. Moreover, they highlight structural prediction biases toward core cities."
}