# Benchmarking Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Biometric Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24214 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24214/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 69 of its 111 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-jailbreaks-and-adversarial-robustness/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Foundation versus Domain-specific Models: Performance Comparison, Fusion, and Explainability in Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03541/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models for Heterogeneous Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15406/) (2026)
- [MLLM-based Textual Explanations for Face Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16629/) (2026)
- [SpectraIrisPAD: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models for Spectrally Conditioned Multispectral Iris Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06103/) (2025)
- [FPBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Multimodal Large Language Models for Fingerprint Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18073/) (2025)
- [Emergent Morphing Attack Detection in Open Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15461/) (2026)
- [Compatibility of Face Embeddings Across Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07282/) (2026)
- [Generalist Multimodal LLMs Gain Biometric Expertise via Human Salience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17173/) (2026)
- [VISER: Visually-Informed System for Enhanced Robustness in Iris Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17859/) (2026)
- [A Systematic Failure Analysis of Vision Foundation Models for Open Set Iris Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19020/) (2026)
- [Foundation and Multimodal Large Language Models for Face Presentation and Morph Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29802/) (2026)
- [Unmasking Face Embeddings: Reading, Rendering and Naming with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00411/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking the Explanatory Quality of Open-Weight Vision-Language Models in Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21879/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking CLIP for Zero-Shot Face and Periocular Gender Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06102/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The advent of foundation models, particularly Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), has redefined the frontiers of artificial intelligence, enabling remarkable generalization across diverse tasks with minimal or no supervision. Yet, their potential in biometric recognition and analysis remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the zero-shot and few-shot performance of state-of-the-art publicly available VLMs and MLLMs across six biometric tasks spanning the face and iris modalities: face verification, soft biometric attribute prediction (gender and race), iris recognition, presentation attack detection (PAD), and face manipulation detection (morphs and deepfakes). A total of 41 VLMs were used in this evaluation. Experiments show that embeddings from these foundation models can be used for diverse biometric tasks with varying degrees of success. For example, in the case of face verification, a True Match Rate (TMR) of 96.77 percent was obtained at a False Match Rate (FMR) of 1 percent on the Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) dataset, without any fine-tuning. In the case of iris recognition, the TMR at 1 percent FMR on the IITD-R-Full dataset was 97.55 percent without any fine-tuning. Further, we show that applying a simple classifier head to these embeddings can help perform DeepFake detection for faces, Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) for irides, and extract soft biometric attributes like gender and ethnicity from faces with reasonably high accuracy. This work reiterates the potential of pretrained models in achieving the long-term vision of Artificial General Intelligence.