# Face Age Verification Vulnerabilities Under Simple Appearance Manipulations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24194 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24194/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

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- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [Gradient Starvation: A Learning Proclivity in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09468/) (2020)
- [AdvHat: Real-world adversarial attack on ArcFace Face ID system](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08705/) (2019)
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- [Unsupervised Learning of Debiased Representations with Pseudo-Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02943/) (2021)
- [OrdinalCLIP: Learning Rank Prompts for Language-Guided Ordinal Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02338/) (2022)
- [MiVOLO: Multi-input Transformer for Age and Gender Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04616/) (2023)
- [FLAC: Fairness-Aware Representation Learning by Suppressing Attribute-Class Associations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14252/) (2023)
- [Towards Fair Face Verification: An In-depth Analysis of Demographic Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10011/) (2023)
- [BAdd: Bias Mitigation through Bias Addition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11439/) (2024)
- [MAVias: Mitigate any Visual Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06632/) (2024)
- [VB-Mitigator: An Open-source Framework for Evaluating and Advancing Visual Bias Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18348/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online platforms increasingly rely on automated age estimation systems to enforce minimum-age policies. Focusing on vision-based models designed for this task, concerns arise regarding their robustness to simple appearance changes that underage individuals may use to bypass such systems, such as drawing a mustache or applying lipstick. In this work, we present a systematic study of age verification robustness by simulating visual alterations that can be easily achieved by underage individuals. We evaluate seven models, including vision, vision-language, and multimodal large language models, across three datasets and four manipulation types. Interestingly, under drawn beard stubble, up to 61% of True Negatives are flipped into False Positives. Furthermore, we investigate how different demographics are affected by such manipulations, finding that Indians are more affected by beard stubble manipulations, while females are more affected than males across all manipulations. Finally, we explore how these biases can be mitigated using bias mitigation methodologies in lightweight linear probe settings.