Watermark Removal

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Overview

Watermark removal studies how edits can erase or weaken embedded signals used to identify generated or copyrighted content across text, images, and audio. Approaches include paraphrasing and rewriting, image reconstruction and frequency or latent-space manipulation, diffusion-based regeneration, and speech enhancement. Evaluations measure whether detectors still recognize the mark alongside content quality, semantic preservation, and whether forensic methods can detect the removal itself. The central tension is that attacks aim to remove marks with minimal damage, while stronger watermarks must withstand diverse edits without degrading the content they protect.

Latest papers

CardsList

40 papers7 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. FiLM-CAM: Keyed Feature Modulation for Conditional-Access Watermarking

    Oct 21, 2026Yash Kulthe, Vishal Asnani, Shruti Agarwal +2Watermark Removal

    DECaDE, University of Surrey, UK · Adobe Research

  2. BrushOff: Stroke-Based Re-rendering as a Watermark Removal Attack on Painting

    Oct 19, 2026Hao Chen, Junnan XuWatermark RemovalRobust Watermarking

  3. Erase the Mark, Preserve the Motion: Temporally Consistent Removal of Video Watermarks

    Oct 15, 2026Yifan Liao, Zhen Sun, Zhicong Huang +6Watermark RemovalRobust Watermarking

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Ant Group · Nanyang Technological University +2

  4. Diffusion-Generated Image Watermarking: A Two-Axis Taxonomy and Three Protocol-Bounded Case Studies

    Oct 7, 2026Sung Ju Lee, Nam Ik ChoDiffusion Model WatermarkingAI-Generated Image Watermarking

    Department of ECE & INMC, Seoul National University, Korea

  5. LiBRA: Detection-Aware Image Watermark Removal via Bidirectional Latent Optimization

    Oct 2, 2026Saibo Ye, Huajie Chen, Xin Guo +5Watermark RemovalAI-Generated Image Watermarking

    Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau, Macao SAR, China · Corresponding Author · School of Information and Communications Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China +2

  6. Exploring Weaknesses of Generative Image Watermarks against Latent Frequency Masking

    Oct 1, 2026Kirill Aistov, Khaled Abud, Irina Serzhenko +8Diffusion Model WatermarkingWatermark Removal

    MSU AI Institute, Moscow, Russia · Trusted AI Research Center RAS, Moscow, Russia

  7. WARP: A Unified Benchmark for Invisible Image Watermarking -- Robustness and Protection Against Attacks

    Sep 30, 2026Khaled Abud, Aleksey Yakushev, Aleksandr Akimenkov +9Watermark RemovalRobust Watermarking

    MSU Institute for Artificial Intelligence Moscow, Russia · Trusted AI Research Center RAS Moscow, Russia · Independent researcher Moscow, Russia

  8. FeatMark: Feature-level Watermark Protection against Mimicry Attacks with Diffusion Models

    Sep 25, 2026Haoyang Li, Ruoxi Sun, Qingqing Ye +4AI-Generated Image WatermarkingDiffusion Model Watermarking

    The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · CSIRO’s Data61 · Macquarie University

  9. The Vulnerability of Neural Audio Watermarks under Speech Enhancement

    Sep 24, 2026Xincong Zhong, Shengyao Wang, Lingfeng Yao +4Watermark RemovalAudio Watermarking

    Waseda University, Japan · University of Houston, USA

  10. Where Does the Watermark Hide? Push-Pull Disentanglement for Invisible Watermark Removal

    Sep 22, 2026Jidong Yang, Huaike Yu, Qi Li +4Watermark RemovalDisentangled Representation Learning

    Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong Computer Science Center, and Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Industrial Network and Information System Security, Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan 250353, China · Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan), Dongguan, Guangdong 518057, China · School of Information Science and Engineering, Dalian Polytechnic University, Dalian 116034, China +1

  11. RemTraceNet: Few-Shot Forensic Detection of Invisible Watermark Attacks

    Sep 18, 2026Jidong Yang, Huaike Yu, Qi Li +6Watermark Removal DetectionDigital Image Forensics

    Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education; Shandong Computer Science Center; Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Industrial Network and Information System Security; Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science; Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan 250353, China · Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan), Dongguan, Guangdong 518057, China · Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology (iC2), University of Wollongong, Australia +1

  12. Disentangle and Drop: Robust Universal Removal of Image Watermarks via Reconstructive Grayscale Residual Decomposition

    Sep 18, 2026Qi Li, Jidong Yang, Feng-Lei Fan +7Watermark RemovalRobust Watermarking

    Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education; Shandong Computer Science Center; Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Industrial Network and Information System Security; and Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan 250353, China · Department of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · School of Computer and Information Sciences, College of Engineering, Science and Environment, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia +2

  13. DRIFT: Removing Diffusion Watermarks by Deflecting the Generative Trajectory

    Sep 8, 2026Rui Bao, Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li +3Diffusion Model WatermarkingWatermark Removal

    University of New South Wales · Griffith University

  14. One Prompt Is Enough: Watermark Laundering Through Foundation Image Models

    Sep 1, 2026Jidong Yang, Qi Li, Wei Zong +5Watermark RemovalRobust Watermarking

    Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education; Shandong Computer Science Center; Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Industrial Network and Information System Security; Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science; Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan 250353, China · Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology (iC2), University of Wollongong, Australia · School of Information Science and Engineering, Dalian Polytechnic University, Dalian 116034, China

  15. Semantic Watermarking with Order-Robust Detection over Sub-sentence Units

    Aug 27, 2026Abdulrahman Diaa, Jonathan Petit, Florian KerschbaumText WatermarkingRobust Watermarking

    University of Waterloo · Qualcomm

  16. How Fragile Is Your Watermark? Training-Free Structural Removal of Neural Audio Watermarks

    Aug 17, 2026Likhith KumaraWatermark RemovalAudio Watermarking

    Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India

  17. MarkNull: Model-Agnostic Watermark Removal in AI-Generated Images via On-Manifold Latent Manipulation

    Aug 10, 2026Jie Cao, Qi Li, Zelin Zhang +4Watermark RemovalRobust Watermarking

    Queen’s University, Canada · University of Waterloo, Canada

  18. SPFM-Net: Semantic-Prior-Guided Frequency-Constrained Mamba for Invisible Watermark Attack

    Jul 30, 2026Chunpeng Wang, Yanan Shi, Zhiqiu Xia +3Watermark Removal

    Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) · Dalian Maritime University · Dalian Polytechnic University

  19. FDDWAN: A Frequency-Decoupled Diffusion Network for Watermarking Attack

    Jul 30, 2026Chunpeng Wang, Yuxin Li, Xiaoyu Wang +3Watermark Removal

    Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan, Shandong Province, China · Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, Liaoning Province, China · Dalian Polytechnic University, Dalian, Liaoning Province, China

  20. AI Watermark Evidence Fails Forensic Readiness: An Empirical Evaluation

    Jul 17, 2026Saifur Rahman Tamim, Amir Labib KhanWatermark RemovalText Watermarking

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering Northern University Bangladesh

  21. Learning to Evade: Adaptive Attacks on Audio Watermarking

    Jun 21, 2026Weikang Ding, Hanqing Guo, Rui Duan +4Watermark RemovalAudio Watermarking

    University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA · University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA · University of South Florida, USA +2

  22. T2S: A Rehearsal-Based Approach for Extraction-Resistant Model Watermarking

    Jun 10, 2026Jian-Ping Mei, Weibin Zhang, Ao Yao +2Watermark RemovalModel Extraction Attacks

    College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310023 China

  23. Audio Pirates: Black-box Audio Watermark Removal via Diffusion Priors

    May 28, 2026Lingfeng Yao, Xincong Zhong, Chenpei Huang +6Watermark RemovalAudio Watermarking

    University of Houston · Waseda University · UC Berkeley +3

  24. Linear Ensembles Wash Away Watermarks: On the Fragility of Distributional Perturbations in LLMs

    May 28, 2026Zhihao Wu, Gracia Gong, Qinglin Zhu +2Watermark RemovalLLM Watermarking

    Department of Informatics, King’s College London, UK · Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, UK · Department of Statistics, University of Warwick, UK.

  25. Do Modern Post-Hoc Watermarking Methods Beat Broken-Arrows?

    May 26, 2026Enoal Gesny, Eva GiboulotWatermark RemovalDataset Watermarking

    Inria Rennes, France

  26. Watermarks Attack Watermarks: Re-Watermarking as a Generic Removal Strategy

    May 16, 2026Maria Bulychev, Neil G. Marchant, Benjamin I. P. RubinsteinWatermark RemovalDigital Image Forensics

    University of Melbourne

  27. PGID: Progressive Guided Inversion and Denoising for Robust Watermark Detection

    May 10, 2026Minh Quoc Duong, Chun Tong Lei, Chun Pong LauDiffusion Model InversionDiffusion Model Watermarking

    City University of Hong Kong

  28. Vaporizer: Breaking Watermarking Schemes for Large Language Model Outputs

    May 8, 2026Jonathan Hong Jin Ng, Anh Tu Ngo, Anupam ChattopadhyayWatermark RemovalLLM Watermarking

    College of Computing and Data Science Nanyang Technological University Singapore

  29. Chainwash: Multi-Step Rewriting Attacks on Diffusion Language Model Watermarks

    May 6, 2026Mohd Ruhul Ameen, Akif Islam, Nadim Mahmud +1Diffusion Model WatermarkingWatermark Removal

    College of Engineering and Computer Science, Marshall University, Huntington, WV, USA · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Rajshahi, Rajshahi, Bangladesh · Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA

  30. The Forensic Cost of Watermark Removal: From Dedicated Attacks to Image Editing

    Apr 28, 2026Gautier Evennou, Ewa KijakWatermark RemovalDigital Image Forensics

    IMATAG · IRISA, Univ. Rennes, INRIA, CNRS