The paper investigates whether releasing a public detector for large language model (LLM) watermarks is safe. It first assesses the risk of a public detector at different access levels, then proposes a split-key watermarking scheme that publishes one key for public detection while keeping a second key private for full verification. Experiments show that public detection only slightly improves watermark removal under limited edit budgets but enables forgery, which the private pipeline can detect, suggesting that releasing half of the watermark can provide transparency without significantly increasing liability.
By Georgios Milis, Tom Sander, Tom\'a\v{s} Sou\v{c}ek, Heng Huang, Pierre Fernandez
The paper proposes a defense against watermark forgery in generative models by randomizing the selection of watermark keys for each query and accepting content only if exactly one key detects a watermark. This approach provides a sample‑count‑independent upper bound on forgery success for blind attackers while preserving model utility. Experiments show a dramatic drop in forgery success rates—from 87% to 1% with four keys for text and from 100% to 2% for images—without significant computational overhead.
By Toluwani Aremu, Noor Hussein, Munachiso Nwadike, Samuele Poppi, Jie Zhang, Karthik Nandakumar, Neil Gong, Nils Lukas
arXiv:2608.29212v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Existing video watermarking systems are symmetric: the party that can verify a mark holds the extractor weights or generator secret and can therefore...
By Guang Yang, Fengchen Liu
arXiv:2609.39024v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) generation is gaining increasing popularity with the general public, motivating the development of reliable mechanisms for copyrigh...
By Dixi Yao, Kaiwen Chen, Tahseen Rabbani, Tian Li
arXiv:2608. 03174v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI systems increasingly produce content whose provenance is difficult to verify, motivating watermarking techniques for identifying model-generated outputs.
By Miryam Mi-Ying Huang, Chung-Wei Lee, Max Raffel, Er-Cheng Tang
arXiv:2609.40031v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Digital image watermarking is increasingly critical in media contexts, as emerging regulations and industry practices require marking AI-generated co...
By Khaled Abud, Aleksey Yakushev, Aleksandr Akimenkov, Irina Serzhenko, Kirill Aistov, Egor Kovalev, Dmitry Obydenkov, Sergey Lavrushkin, Anastasia Antsiferova, Dmitriy Vatolin, Yury Markin, Kirill Lukianov
arXiv:2508.03829v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The growing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns about their misuse in generating harmful or deceptive content. To addres...
By Jiahao Xu, Rui Hu, Olivera Kotevska, Zikai Zhang
The paper introduces the concept of watermark laundering, where an attacker uses a single reconstruction prompt on public foundation image models to produce a visually faithful output that renders invisible watermarks undecodable. The authors evaluate this failure mode across six OpenAI and Google image editing models, three watermarking schemes, and 1,800 reconstructions, finding that OpenAI models cause the strongest payload disruption while Nano Banana 2 shows vulnerability of DwtDct under high-fidelity reconstruction. Prompt ablation experiments reveal that the disruption is driven by the reconstruction pathway itself rather than any specific removal instruction, highlighting prompt-conditioned reconstruction as a distinct attack interface.
By Jidong Yang, Qi Li, Wei Zong, Yang-Wai Chow, Willy Susilo, Huaike Yu, Chunpeng Wang, Suo Gao
IRIS is a training‑free watermarking scheme for diffusion‑generated images that binds a watermark to the image’s visual semantics. It derives an intrinsic ring identifier from a content code of the non‑watermarked image and injects it late in the generation trajectory, ensuring the mark survives common processing while breaking under semantic changes or foreign images. Experiments on three prompt datasets show IRIS reliably detects watermarks, maintains fidelity to the original image, and resists forgery techniques that defeat other marks.
By Xiaoyan Feng, Zheng Gao, Tong Guan, Rui Bao, Bokang Zeng, Xiaoyu Li, Jiaojiao Jiang
arXiv:2609.38722v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: LLM watermarking has become an effective approach to distinguishing AI-generated text from human-written text by embedding detectable patterns during...
By Zewei Deng, Muhammad Siddeek, Liyan Xie, Mohamed Seif, Mengdi Wang, H. Vincent Poor, Andrea Goldsmith
Digital image watermarking is increasingly critical in media contexts, as emerging regulations and industry practices require marking AI-generated content and ensuring traceable sources to prevent man...
arXiv:2609.39623v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The proliferation of high-fidelity generative editing models has made it possible to inject violent or sexual content into otherwise ordinary images wh...
By Yoonseo Kim, Seungwoo Baek, Junyoung Park