Whose record is this? Diagnosing and authorizing record use in personalized multimodal models
Abstract
Contextualized visual personalization can retrieve a true record yet apply it to the wrong visual subject. We formalize when a record may condition an answer as \emph{record authorization}: subject presence ($P$), record-edge validity ($E$), and answer support ($S$) must all hold. We call violations visual memory misbinding (VMM). We construct RecordAuth-Diag, a 3,690-case matched diagnostic suite that changes one image--record edge while holding the query, question, record text, and image multiset fixed. Card removal and nonce relabeling attribute these failures to supplied records. Raw-bank failures span Qwen-, Phi-, and Gemma-family interfaces: Gemma-3-4B-IT reaches 63.69\% local unauthorized use at 25.75\% clean recall. CoViP remains at 26.02\%, versus 22.49\% for its Qwen backbone at similar clean recall. Typed pre-generation authorization reduces Qwen card exposure on RecordAuth-Diag from 43.63\% to 3.06\%, while positive recall changes from 86.26\% to 60.90\%. Full $P\wedge E\wedge S$ validation uses 560 localized DAVIS cases: top-1 relevance and typed authorization have comparable release (28.93\% and 28.39\%) but 6.79\% and 0.89\% unsafe release, respectively. Of the 33 additional unsafe cases removed, 27 are support, 4 edge, 2 clean, and 0 boundary cases. Thus the observed increment is an $E\wedge S$ decision dominated by support, not an edge check alone. Appearance supplies $E$ evidence only conditional on $P$; authenticated subject tokens instantiate the missing presence witness as a sufficiency control. The claims concern the evaluated contracts, not natural prevalence, consent, or visual identity
