AGMark: Attention-Guided Dynamic Watermarking for Large Vision-Language Models
This addresses content traceability and intellectual property protection for users of large vision-language models, representing a strong specific gain in watermarking techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of watermarking large vision-language models by proposing AGMark, which dynamically embeds watermarks to preserve visual fidelity, achieving at least 99.36% detection accuracy and 88.61% attack resilience while improving generation quality.
Watermarking has emerged as a pivotal solution for content traceability and intellectual property protection in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, vision-agnostic watermarks may introduce visually irrelevant tokens and disrupt visual grounding by enforcing indiscriminate pseudo-random biases. Additionally, current vision-specific watermarks rely on a static, one-time estimation of vision critical weights and ignore the weight distribution density when determining the proportion of protected tokens. This design fails to account for dynamic changes in visual dependence during generation and may introduce low-quality tokens in the long tail. To address these challenges, we propose Attention-Guided Dynamic Watermarking (AGMark), a novel framework that embeds detectable signals while strictly preserving visual fidelity. At each decoding step, AGMark first dynamically identifies semantic-critical evidence based on attention weights for visual relevance, together with context-aware coherence cues, resulting in a more adaptive and well-calibrated evidence-weight distribution. It then determines the proportion of semantic-critical tokens by jointly considering uncertainty awareness (token entropy) and evidence calibration (weight density), thereby enabling adaptive vocabulary partitioning to avoid irrelevant tokens. Empirical results confirm that AGMark outperforms conventional methods, observably improving generation quality and yielding particularly strong gains in visual semantic fidelity in the later stages of generation. The framework maintains highly competitive detection accuracy (at least 99.36\% AUC) and robust attack resilience (at least 88.61\% AUC) without sacrificing inference efficiency, effectively establishing a new standard for reliability-preserving multi-modal watermarking.