FeatMark is a watermarking framework that protects images from text‑to‑image diffusion model mimicry attacks by embedding small, scene‑consistent micro‑features instead of pixel‑level perturbations. It constructs domain‑specific feature banks, selects executable features, and injects them via mask‑guided concept editing to create highly localized, natural edits. Experiments on VGGFace2, CelebA‑HQ, and WikiArt show FeatMark remains robust against ten strong watermark removal attacks and several adaptive attacks, with minimal impact on perceptual quality and extending to video mimicry scenarios.
By Haoyang Li, Ruoxi Sun, Qingqing Ye, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao, Yaxin Xiao, Jason Xue, Haibo Hu
Text-to-image diffusion models enable data-efficient "mimicry" attacks, wherein adversaries fine-tune the model on a handful of public photos to synthesize convincing forgeries of a target individual....
arXiv:2608. 10166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digital watermarking has emerged as a critical technique for provenance and copyright attribution in AI-generated imagery, yet its robustness against realistic, model-agnostic removal attacks remains poorly explored.
By Jie Cao, Qi Li, Zelin Zhang, Xiaodong Wu, Lingshuang Liu, Xiangman Li, Jianbing Ni
arXiv:2602. 09611v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Watermarking has emerged as a pivotal solution for content traceability and intellectual property protection in large vision language models (LVLMs).
By Yue Li, Xin Yi, Dongsheng Shi, Yongyi Cui, Gerard de Melo, Linlin Wang
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
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
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
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:2603. 17531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advancements in diffusion-based image editing pose a significant threat to the authenticity of digital visual content.
By Pengzhen Chen, Yanwei Liu, Xiaoyan Gu, Xiaojun Chen, Wu Liu, Weiping Wang
The paper introduces VeriFi, a watermarking framework that protects face images from AI‑generated manipulation. It embeds a compact semantic latent watermark to preserve content, localizes pixel‑level edits without explicit payloads, and simulates realistic deepfake attacks to improve robustness. Experiments on CelebA‑HQ and FFHQ show that VeriFi outperforms existing methods in robustness, localization accuracy, and recovery quality.
By Peipeng Yu, Jinfeng Xie, Chengfu Ou, Xiaoyu Zhou, Jianwei Fei, Yunshu Dai, Zhihua Xia, Chip Hong Chang
arXiv:2610.03166v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Digital watermarking supports source attribution for AI-generated images, but its reliability depends on resistance to removal attacks. Some attacks...
By Saibo Ye, Huajie Chen, Xin Guo, Le Yang, Chi Liu, Xiangyu Hu, Jingjing Guo, Tianqing Zhu
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