Out of the box age estimation through facial imagery: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Vision-Language Models vs. out-of-the-box Traditional Architectures
Facial age estimation plays a critical role in content moderation, age verification, and deepfake detection. However, no prior benchmark has systematically compared modern vision-language models (VLMs) with specialized age estimation architectures. We present the first large-scale cross-paradigm benchmark, evaluating 34 models - 22 specialized architectures with publicly available pretrained weights and 12 general-purpose VLMs - across eight standard datasets (UTKFace, IMDB-WIKI, MORPH, AFAD, CACD, FG-NET, APPA-REAL, and AgeDB), totaling 1,100 test images per model. Our key finding is striking: zero-shot VLMs significantly outperform most specialized models, achieving an average mean absolute error (MAE) of 5.65 years compared to 9.88 years for non-LLM models. The best-performing VLM (Gemini 3 Flash Preview, MAE 4.32) surpasses the strongest non-LLM model (MiVOLO, MAE 5.10) by 15%. MiVOLO - unique in combining face and body features using Vision Transformers - is the only specialized model that remains competitive with VLMs. We further analyze age verification at the 18-year threshold and find that most non-LLM models exhibit false adult rates between 39% and 100% for minors, whereas VLMs reduce this to 16%-29%. Additionally, coarse age binning (8-9 classes) consistently increases MAE beyond 13 years. Stratified analysis across 14 age groups reveals that all models struggle most at extreme ages (under 5 and over 65). Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that task-specific architectures are necessary for high-performance age estimation and suggest that future work should focus on distilling VLM capabilities into efficient specialized models.