GeoEdit: Adversarial De-Evidencing for Silent Geoprivacy Protection via Image Editing

Abstract

Recent efforts have demonstrated the strong capabilities of Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) in geographic reasoning. By jointly analyzing subtle visual cues, these models can infer the locations of photos, thus enabling doxing even by non-expert adversaries. Existing defense methods struggle to balance the shareability of photos with effective protection, and often fail to sufficiently disrupt the implicit geo-evidence chains embedded in scene semantics. To this end, we propose GeoEdit, an adversarial de-evidencing framework for silent geoprivacy protection via image editing. Specifically, we apply minimal edits to high-risk evidence anchors in the image, thereby disrupting the underlying spatial reasoning chains while preserving overall scene semantics. We identify these anchors by combining structured knowledge with adversarially discovered geographic cues. To further navigate the large editing action space, we adopt a learnable policy to iteratively refine editing decisions, distilling successful trajectories into transferable natural-language insights for consistent and efficient editing. Evaluated on LifePhotoBench, GeoEdit achieves strong protection against 6 mainstream MLRMs, outperforming visual perturbation baselines by over 0.59 in image fidelity.