Backward Compatibility in Zero-Bit Neural Audio Watermarking

The paper formalizes backward compatibility for zero‑bit neural audio watermarking and introduces a training framework that pairs a new detector with a sequence of frozen legacy embedders. Using a performance‑weighted sampling strategy, the detector maintains accuracy across all earlier versions, but this coupling can cause an embedder‑collapse effect that degrades the true negative rate against out‑of‑chain embedders. To mitigate this, an Angular Diversity Loss is added, ensuring each new embedder occupies a distinct output space region and restoring near‑perfect true negative rates without harming detection accuracy or audio quality.

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