GenPTW: Latent Image Watermarking for Provenance Tracing and Tamper Localization

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Authors: Zhenliang Gan, Chunya Liu, Yichao Tang, Binghao Wang, Shiwen Cui, Weiqiang Wang, Xinpeng Zhang
Cited by: 2

Abstract

The proliferation of generative image models has revolutionized AIGC creation while amplifying concerns over content provenance and manipulation forensics. Existing methods are typically either unable to localize tampering or restricted to specific generative settings, limiting their practical utility. We propose GenPTW, a General watermarking framework that unifies Provenance tracing and Tamper localization in latent space. It supports both in-generation and post-generation embedding without altering the generative process, and is plug-and-play compatible with latent diffusion models (LDMs) and visual autoregressive (VAR) models. To achieve precise provenance tracing and tamper localization, we embed the watermark using two complementary mechanisms: cross-attention fusion aligned with latent semantics and spatial fusion providing explicit spatial guidance for edit sensitivity. A tamper-aware extractor jointly conducts provenance tracing and tamper localization by leveraging watermark features together with high-frequency features. Experiments show that GenPTW maintains high visual fidelity and strong robustness against diverse AIGC-editing.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Digital Media Forensic Detection Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis Cell Image Analysis Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Publisher
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Volume
40
Issue
5
Pages
4085–4093
Publication date
14 March 2026