Sangpil Kim

Recent advances in text-to-image models have increased the exposure of powerful image editing techniques as a tool, raising concerns about their potential for malicious use. An emerging line of research to address such threats focuses on implanting "protective" adversarial noise into images before their public release, so future attempts to edit them using text-to-image models can be impeded. However, subsequent works have shown that these adversarial noises are often easily "reversed," e.g., with techniques as simple as JPEG compression, casting doubt on the practicality of the approach. In this paper, we argue that adversarial noise for image protection should not only be imperceptible, as has been a primary focus of prior work, but also irreversible, viz., it should be difficult to detect as noise provided that the original image is hidden. We propose a surprisingly simple method to enhance the robustness of image protection methods against noise reversal techniques. Specifically, it applies an adaptive per-region Gaussian blur on the noise to adjust the overall frequency spectrum. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method consistently improves the per-sample worst-case protection performance of existing methods against a wide range of reversal techniques on diverse image editing scenarios, while also reducing quality degradation due to noise in terms of perceptual metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/jsu-kim/BlurGuard.

Image watermarking supports authenticity and provenance, yet many schemes are still easy to bypass with various distortions and powerful generative edits. Deep learning-based watermarking has improved robustness to diffusion-based image editing, but a gap remains when a watermarked image is converted to video by image-to-video (I2V), in which per-frame watermark detection weakens. I2V has quickly advanced from short, jittery clips to multi-second, temporally coherent scenes, and it now serves not only content creation but also world-modeling and simulation workflows, making cross-modal watermark recovery crucial. We present WaTeRFlow, a framework tailored for robustness under I2V. It consists of (i) FUSE (Flow-guided Unified Synthesis Engine), which exposes the encoder-decoder to realistic distortions via instruction-driven edits and a fast video diffusion proxy during training, (ii) optical-flow warping with a Temporal Consistency Loss (TCL) that stabilizes per-frame predictions, and (iii) a semantic preservation loss that maintains the conditioning signal. Experiments across representative I2V models show accurate watermark recovery from frames, with higher first-frame and per-frame bit accuracy and resilience when various distortions are applied before or after video generation.