PrivMark: Pixel-Space Steering against Privacy Leakage in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) routinely disclose soft-biometric attributes such as age, gender, and race in their text outputs, exposing demographic information from uploaded images to any downstream API user. Existing privacy defenses do not fit this setting: face de-identification leaves distributed soft-biometric cues intact, classifier-targeted adversarial perturbations do not transfer to open-ended generation, and stronger VLM-specific methods require retraining or runtime activation access unavailable to downstream APIs. We propose PrivMark, a framework that suppresses biometric leakage at the image level. By analyzing VLM activations, we identify two weakly aligned steering vector directions in hidden-state space, each tied to a distinct leakage behavior — one corresponding to incidental attribute disclosure under open-ended descriptions, the other to compliance with direct biometric probes instead of refusal — and encode both directions into a single bounded pixel perturbation, so the protected image alone enforces privacy with no invasive access to model internals at deployment. To support evaluation, we assemble BioleakBench, $1,600$ VQA pairs covering biometric privacy attributes under both free-form description and direct-probe protocols. Across three white-box source models, PrivMark achieves up to $85.9\%$ biometric suppression while retaining $75\%$ of clean OK-VQA utility, up to $1.4\times$ the privacy-utility tradeoff of the strongest pixel-only baseline. The same one-shot perturbations transfer consistently to seven unseen VLMs including closed-source APIs. Code and benchmark are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/pixel_steering_vlm-A558/