forensic technology developers

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently been proposed as promising tools for face recognition, as they can produce natural language explanations alongside similarity scores. This capability is considered appealing for face comparisons in forensic contexts, which require decisions to be transparent and auditable. However, existing evaluations of VLMs for that use case focus mostly on recognition accuracy, while the validity of generated explanations remains unquantified. In this work, we introduce a benchmarking framework for VLM-based face recognition that treats explanation quality as a core evaluation axis. We propose two criteria that explanations should satisfy: relevance, i.e., reliance on identity-stable facial features; and faithfulness, i.e., alignment with the visible image content without hallucinated features. We jointly develop a methodology enabling the quantification of relevance and faithfulness of evaluated models, based on constraining model outputs to a structured explanation format that supports automated querying and auditing. Using this framework, we benchmark several families of open-weight VLMs, jointly evaluating face verification accuracy and explanation quality. Our results highlight remaining shortcomings of produced explanations, and emphasize the need for such explanation quality metrics to get a complete picture of model performance. The proposed benchmark and open-source evaluation harness provide a foundation for proper benchmarking and future fine-tuning of explainable face recognition systems.

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to legal and criminal justice tasks, yet existing work focuses almost exclusively on post-arrest scenarios where the suspect's identity is already known, leaving the critical pre-arrest challenge of inferring suspect characteristics from incomplete evidence largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce the Profiling, Investigation, and Judgment (PIJ), comprising 2,500 real homicide cases from five countries. PIJ evaluates LLMs across three tasks that span the entire criminal investigation pipeline: criminal profiling, which requires abductive reasoning to infer suspect attributes from fragmentary scene evidence, crime process reconstruction, which tests structured information extraction, and sentence prediction, which demands legal deductive reasoning. We evaluate 9 powerful LLMs and find that performance degrades systematically as tasks shift from explicit fact extraction to implicit reasoning over unknown suspect profiles. Categories requiring inferential reasoning, such as motivation and victim-offender relationships, remain the primary bottlenecks. Further analysis reveals substantial gaps between LLMs and human experts, along with pervasive biases in gender, age, and motive attribution. Our findings indicate that pre-arrest inference from incomplete evidence remains an open challenge.