# Combating Human Trafficking with Deep Multimodal Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.02735 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02735/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Multimodal End-to-End Sparse Model for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09666/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Modality-Pairwise Unsupervised Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11482/) (2022)
- [Weakly-supervised Multi-task Learning for Multimodal Affect Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11560/) (2021)
- [IDTraffickers: An Authorship Attribution Dataset to link and connect Potential Human-Trafficking Operations on Text Escort Advertisements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05484/) (2023)
- [Computer Vision for Multimedia Geolocation in Human Trafficking Investigation: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15448/) (2024)
- [Towards deployment-centric multimodal AI beyond vision and language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03603/) (2025)
- [MATCHED: Multimodal Authorship-Attribution To Combat Human Trafficking in Escort-Advertisement Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13794/) (2024)
- [Language Models for Adult Service Website Text Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10743/) (2025)
- [ExPerT: Personalizing LLM Responses to Users' Domain Expertise via Query-Wise Semantic and Keystroke Behavioral Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01242/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human trafficking is a global epidemic affecting millions of people across the planet. Sex trafficking, the dominant form of human trafficking, has seen a significant rise mostly due to the abundance of escort websites, where human traffickers can openly advertise among at-will escort advertisements. In this paper, we take a major step in the automatic detection of advertisements suspected to pertain to human trafficking. We present a novel dataset called Trafficking-10k, with more than 10,000 advertisements annotated for this task. The dataset contains two sources of information per advertisement: text and images. For the accurate detection of trafficking advertisements, we designed and trained a deep multimodal model called the Human Trafficking Deep Network (HTDN).