Xiangman Li

Xiaodong Wu, Qi Li, Xiangman Li et al.

This paper investigates a fundamental yet underexplored question: can watermarked images remain editable without compromising watermark integrity? We propose SafeMark, a framework for watermark-preserving text-guided image manipulation that explicitly integrates watermark integrity into the editing process. Specifically, SafeMark adds a thresholded watermark-decoding loss directly to the diffusion editor's training objective, fine-tuning the editor so that semantically valid edits also preserve the embedded watermark at the final output. This design admits a clean information-theoretic justification: maintaining high bit-accuracy on the edited image lower-bounds the mutual information that the editor channel preserves between watermark and edited output, the quantity that fundamentally controls watermark recoverability. SafeMark is compatible with differentiable diffusion-based editors, and requires no architectural modification. Extensive evaluations across multiple datasets, text-guided editing methods, and post-edit distortion settings demonstrate that SafeMark achieves high watermark bit accuracy across diverse editing settings while maintaining high-quality semantic edits, without sacrificing robustness to common post-edit distortions. These results demonstrate that semantic editability and watermark integrity are fundamentally compatible, enabling trustworthy image provenance in generative editing pipelines.

Xiaodong Wu, Xiangman Li, Qi Li et al.

Text-guided image manipulation with diffusion models enables flexible and precise editing based on prompts, but raises ethical and copyright concerns due to potential unauthorized modifications. To address this, we propose SecureT2I, a secure framework designed to prevent unauthorized editing in diffusion-based generative models. SecureT2I is compatible with both general-purpose and domain-specific models and can be integrated via lightweight fine-tuning without architectural changes. We categorize images into a permit set and a forbid set based on editing permissions. For the permit set, the model learns to perform high-quality manipulations as usual. For the forbid set, we introduce training objectives that encourage vague or semantically ambiguous outputs (e.g., blurred images), thereby suppressing meaningful edits. The core challenge is to block unauthorized editing while preserving editing quality for permitted inputs. To this end, we design separate loss functions that guide selective editing behavior. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and models show that SecureT2I effectively degrades manipulation quality on forbidden images while maintaining performance on permitted ones. We also evaluate generalization to unseen inputs and find that SecureT2I consistently outperforms baselines. Additionally, we analyze different vagueness strategies and find that resize-based degradation offers the best trade-off for secure manipulation control.