cs.CVOct 29, 2026

CLaW: Codec-Guided Adaptive Latent Watermarking for Traceable Diffusion Image Generation

Authors: Huangchao Song, Lingyun Yu, Cong Li, Peiqi Jiang, Mingqi Fang, Hongtao Xie

Organizations: University of Science and Technology of China · Tianjin University

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of text-to-image diffusion models, increasingly realistic AI-generated content has raised serious concerns about misuse and copyright infringement. Digital watermarking offers a promising solution by enabling user-level traceability, yet existing methods remain difficult to deploy at scale, hindered by costly model retraining or detection, poor effectiveness-fidelity trade-offs, and limited robustness to image transformations. To address these challenges, we propose CLaW (Codec-guided Latent Watermarking), a robust and efficient watermarking framework for traceable diffusion image generation with frozen diffusion backbones and inversion-free detection. Specifically, CLaW first uses a pretrained watermark codec to map each watermark message to a latent residual, enabling low-cost sampling-time injection. Then, the residual is injected within a late denoising window, where image semantics are better preserved and the watermark signal is less perturbed by subsequent denoising updates, yielding a better balance between watermark effectiveness and image fidelity. Furthermore, we introduce a decoder-guided adaptive injection mechanism that uses decoding confidence as feedback to dynamically calibrate watermark strength, reinforcing weak watermark signals and improving robustness under image transformations. Extensive experiments show that CLaW preserves high visual fidelity and achieves state-of-the-art robustness under image transformations, enabling reliable user-level traceability.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables13 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Mar 30, 2025

TraceMark-LDM: Authenticatable Watermarking for Latent Diffusion Models via Binary-Guided Rearrangement

Image generation algorithms are increasingly integral to diverse aspects of human society, driven by their practical applications. However, insufficient oversight in artificial Intelligence generated content (AIGC) can facilitate the spread of malicious content and increase the risk of copyright infringement. Among the diverse range of image generation models, the Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) is currently the most widely used, dominating the majority of the Text-to-Image model market. Currently, most attribution methods for LDMs rely on directly embedding watermarks into the generated images or their intermediate noise, a practice that compromises both the quality and the robustness of the generated content. To address these limitations, we introduce TraceMark-LDM, an novel algorithm that integrates watermarking to attribute generated images while guaranteeing non-destructive performance. Unlike current methods, TraceMark-LDM leverages watermarks as guidance to rearrange random variables sampled from a Gaussian distribution. To mitigate potential deviations caused by inversion errors, the small absolute elements are grouped and rearranged. Additionally, we fine-tune the LDM encoder to enhance the robustness of the watermark. Experimental results show that images synthesized using TraceMark-LDM exhibit superior quality and attribution accuracy compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques. Notably, TraceMark-LDM demonstrates exceptional robustness against various common attack methods, consistently outperforming SOTA methods.
Mar 27, 2026

Gaussian Shannon: High-Precision Diffusion Model Watermarking Based on Communication

Diffusion models generate high-quality images but pose serious risks like copyright violation and disinformation. Watermarking is a key defense for tracing and authenticating AI-generated content. However, existing methods rely on threshold-based detection, which only supports fuzzy matching and cannot recover structured watermark data bit-exactly, making them unsuitable for offline verification or applications requiring lossless metadata (e.g., licensing instructions). To address this problem, in this paper, we propose Gaussian Shannon, a watermarking framework that treats the diffusion process as a noisy communication channel and enables both robust tracing and exact bit recovery. Our method embeds watermarks in the initial Gaussian noise without fine-tuning or quality loss. We identify two types of channel interference, namely local bit flips and global stochastic distortions, and design a cascaded defense combining error-correcting codes and majority voting. This ensures reliable end-to-end transmission of semantic payloads. Experiments across three Stable Diffusion variants and seven perturbation types show that Gaussian Shannon achieves state-of-the-art bit-level accuracy while maintaining a high true positive rate, enabling trustworthy rights attribution in real-world deployment. The source code have been made available at: https://github.com/Rambo-Yi/Gaussian-Shannon
Dec 12, 2024

LVMark: Robust Watermark for Latent Video Diffusion Models

Rapid advancements in video diffusion models have enabled the creation of realistic videos, raising concerns about unauthorized use and driving the demand for techniques to protect model ownership. Existing watermarking methods suffer from two key limitations: they overlook temporal consistency due to conventional watermark decoders and degrade the visual quality of the generated videos. To address these issues, we introduce a robust watermarking method for latent video diffusion models named Latent Video Diffusion Watermarking (LVMark). We propose a novel watermark decoder tailored for generated videos by learning the consistency between adjacent frames. It ensures accurate message decoding, even under malicious attacks, by combining the low-frequency components of the three-dimensional wavelet domain with the color features of the video. Additionally, we train a latent decoder to maintain the visual fidelity of the generated video. Watermarks are embedded into layers with minimal impact on visual appearance using an importance-based weight modulation strategy. We optimize both the watermark decoder and the latent decoder of diffusion model, effectively balancing the trade-off between visual quality and bit accuracy. Our experiments show that our method embeds invisible watermarks into video diffusion models, ensuring robust decoding accuracy with 512-bit capacity, even under distortions.